University of
Michigan
Libraries,
ITTIS TOIIWA





20
WEED
An Original Regency Book
Published November 1961
Copyright, 1961, by Clarence L. Cooper, Jr.
All rights reserved.
No portion of this book may be reprinted in any form without the
written permission of the publishers, except by a reviewer who wishes
to quote brief passages in connection with a critical review for a
newspaper, magazine, radio or television presentation.
This is a work of fiction in a fictional
setting. Any resemblance to persons
living or dead is purely coincidental.


13-296299
For Ada





WEED
Detroit. And it always seemed to be despite them that
you got ahead, or cleared away some of the bigger hurdles.
He didn't know—maybe a guy needed them, when he
wasn't anything but average, when he couldn't expect any-
thing unless something was taken from him against his
will: his pride, his money, or something_and he just had
to go pass the rules of defeat. Something like that.
Now, this bitch knew that he'd just opened the record
shop, that it was the last phase of a new attempt at some-
thing, he didn't know what that he needed every crying
quarter he could lay his hands on. She knew it, and yet
she, with her sonofabitching numbers-playing was here
now, sucking him dry, fighting him, choking him, just
because he had screwed her a few times.
He remembered somebody saying (was it Ruckson, with
his little mouse face and tough little dreams?) that she,
Coral, was the kind of woman to be a whore. That kind
who lean. Not quite but almost. Capitalizing on that inner,
fleshy, hypnotic thing. All women had it, and she had her
nerve, for twenty-eight bucks.
"Here,” he said, and she took the cash, with her screwing
eyes.
“I don't know how to thank you, honey."
“That's okay. Will that be enough?”
“Oh, sure. You're a real help.”
“Is that all I am?"
He turned up Cannonball, in time to hear the climax.
But now it all seemed like a lost cause, especially when
he thought about them being Detroit cats and all. It was
getting more and more like that with him, these few years,
and he was even able to see it more clearly, what with the
broad, standing there, staring at him.
Man, oh, man, Ned thought, calling on that basic thing
of himself, the thing that kept refusing him, the thing that
would have made it possible for him to tell this bitch to
go to hell and she wasn't about to get twenty-eight bucks
from him.
... when here she was, stuffing the bread down safely
fleshy, hypnot quite but almost, to be a whore. That


10
CLARENCE L. COOPER, JR.
between her wide breasts, those firm, luscious breasts, that
made his mouth want of her.
He selected another album and clipped it down on the
plate.
She's got what she wants, he thought. Why doesn't she
puli?
"Thanks a lot, honey.”
“That's all right, baby,” he said, and as he said it, he
knew what it was she was waiting on, and he said it, so
the whole damned thing would be settled: “When will I
see ya?” .
"I'm not doin anything tonight. Burris is workin late
at the meat market."
"Well,” he said, and he remembered the delivery of new
albums from the wholesaler, and his one-sided debit, and
the Christalmighty work he had to do, and even the insides
of her near-white thighs and how they would feel. “What
time?” he asked, when all the while he knew he wouldn't
be able to make it.
“What about ten, after you close up?"
“That's all right with me. I'll meet you at the same place
-Ernie's Bar."
"Bye, bye, baby.”
“So long, sweetheart.”
Her hips left the room, and he was reminded of that
gray way about her.
The next time, he resolved, it won't be a married broad;
I've had my share of 'em.
Yet he knew the fascination of them, the freedom from
obligation-his conscious obligation--they gave him.
He started the jam to whirling, and found with the
needle's knife Conte Condoli, indecisively somewhere on
trumpet: Why did they make it sound so threatening, when
really it wasn't? When it was really like a prayer.
... yes, that's why he liked married broads; in bed
they did things to you that they didn't do to their own
husbands. Why? he went on, digressing into a subject he
"held so little knowledge of. Why was it?


WEED
Was everybody an animal, like that, black or white, all
the same? And the way they seemed to infect a guy! Like
her: the patent way-again-in which she had sold her.
self for twenty-eight bucks.
He got up, because night was coming and he wanted to
see it.
There on the street. It looked like rain, kind of, the
dark clouds reflecting themselves on the silver of the big
front glass, with the words neatly printed just today: Ned's
Record Shop. Like that, and it was almost like you could
tell. A man didn't need to be God to see those kinds of
things.
And, as he stared, and as the night came on, he could
see himself reflected in the silver, and the world, a short
guy, you could say, in the printed sport shirt and the
neat clip-on strides, rust-colored, they were. And the black-
ness of his face: he couldn't see it, truly, not the straight
black lips, or the hunches under the eyes that shone some-
times when he got excited or nervous, or the slow rolling
of black broad brow.
Only the eyes were specific. They glistened, small and
brown (black in the window-mirror, and white), seeing
that black night and coming rain—and he more than ever
looked at himself.
He saw the neon sign across the street, in green (green
made him mad to look at sometimes, he couldn't tell the
reason), and the hump of the whore-building, where you
could buy a piece now and then, but he wasn't going to,
not this evening.
He had to work! Damn it.
And if he couldn't get to Coral, which was already paid
and bought, how the hell could he get over there? To
Wanda. Actually, if he went, it would only be to see her.
Man, that girl.
He turned up the volume.
Wanda.
Wonder why a girl like her would be a whore. Wonder.
The smoothest skin, the firmest bouncy cans, the rounded


CLARENCE L. COOPER, JR.
a the front do of the shoPuld have
He locked the front door and turned up Ella a little, and
went back to the rear of the shop.
He hadn't rolled it, and he should have, because it gets
away from you so fast when you keep it loose. A shady
green, coarse, like tobacco chips almost, but with that feel,
that wet feel, clinging to your fingertips, that you couldn't
mistake as anything but Pot. He dumped it out of the penny
papersack on a newspaper, on his table of all work. He
moved an album of Montovani aside, the kind of music
he was getting more call for these days. Some people were
wising up.
In a battered desk, album-piled, he took out his Top
Papers and brought them over to the table.
Man, this was going to be good.
He rolled the joint for action, nothing huge, no bomber,
but just a nice joint, one in which the marijuana packed
together firmly snug. He guessed he had been thinking of
this all day. He closed the curtains to the outside and
sprayed the room with Glade, until it was smelling too
sweet in there almost, and then he made himself comfort-
able and lighted the joint, sitting at the table.
Awareness spoke out: The Taste. That was the first
thing. Even if you've only just smoked a joint, you get
that taste again, that, unlike tobacco, is phoenix-like, ever
returning. What was it, actually? Green, certainly, like
winterweeds burning, but with a greenness that is so diffi-
cult to imagine. Biting? Yes. Like good tobacco might, like
the nose-mouth-taste smell of a dirty burro, so like a
brother, at the cracked fountain of a Caliente Province
well.
Man and sweat, the burning elements of Ņed Land's
Boo, Pot, Gangster: animal and sweat. Hot sun on a
waving sea of weed, there in that dry climate, being baked
like fine dough. Hands picking, pulling, and a bruise bleed-
ing green, with that smell, that nothing-else-like-it smell,
that lingers in your head and makes you awake, aware
and albingers with that
His lips tightened about the joint, and he moved his


WEED
head to one side, keeping out that burning smoke rising
· from the tip.
His reefer bill. Above all else, that dulled his enjoyment
as he smoked the joint, looking at what was left there,
green, on the newspaper, the remains of a full matchbox
of weed. Very small. Money again.
How it gets into your high, he thought. And his highness
leveled off, due to rise again. So temperamental, Boo was,
like a bitching woman, changing moods with concomitant
mental action.
How could he bitch, though? You couldn't do business
with anyone more reasonable than Ruckson. Funny little
guy. Big dreams. Broads ontoppabroads. Funny.
Yeah, Ruckson wasn't a bug.
Look at that: he had never noticed the Montovani album
really before. Look at that lovely bowl-and-cherries white
girl. Delicious. She made him hungry. He felt himself look-
ing at her and wanting to have some action with a woman,
Coral, Doris, Wanda. He didn't know what made him
think of Doris, rising that way.
The pottish aftertaste lingered in this mouth.
The first thing to do was get those albums straight, if
he didn't take all night with it, being as high as he was
beginning to be. It was some good Boo. Ruckson and his
happy Brazilian.
He picked up a copy of Jet he had bought somewhere
and thrown here on the table. He turned to the centerpage
immediately, let his eyes crawl over the half-naked, half-
white colored girl pictured there, all her rounded insouci-
ance, thinking, if I could get your simple, lovely ass in
bed I'd show you a few things. You who dream of being
a model for Lady Clairol or Coke. Fifty bucks an hour.
I'd give you fifty, you devil, you rounded soft woman, and
I'd show you for it too.
The way he could sink her, he could almost feel it.
This wasn't getting anything done, this. Just sitting and
thinking. Why did Gangster do you like that? And make


16
CLARENCE L. COOPER, JR.
you so hungry, so ravening, both for food and the food
of woman?
How many knew that it was an aphrodisiac?—that was
the word. Florence, the civil service girl in Detroit, had
told him that, and, “Oh, the way you do it when you're
high, Ned!” Or maybe he was fooling himself, and Florence
fooling him too, because she smoked such a hell of a
lot of Pot herself and was an awful liar, and you just
couldn't believe it when women told you things like that.
He knew he was very high from that joint, and he was
very surprised. I came back up, he said inside his mind, a
little glad to realize it, because he had been getting set
to roll another.
Doris, what she said, her face, he seemed to see it all
again:
“The kid don't even know what it is to have a father.
Seven years old, Ned! The other boys at school kid him
about it.”
And he saw himself again sitting in the leather easy
chair, the one he had convinced the manager to put in his
room when they changed the lobby furniture.
"Why don't you get married, Dorry?” he had said.
"Married?" And she looked at him with those eyes, those
sometimey eyes, that frightened him at moments. “I don't
think I have to go lookin, Ned. I don't think any other
man owes me anything but you.” -
“What is this?” he said. “You just wanna be a germ,
hangin onto me for the rest of my life? You're makin
this one damned mess! Ain't it enough, what I do for ya?
I know what it is you want, but you can't have it!”
He saw her again in his mind, positively, just as she
had been, the light red dress for early summer hugging
her slim body—and those tiny breasts with tiny nipples
—and the hash-marks of her brow, accusing him behind
that yellow-smooth skull and fresh-done blossom of soft
red-black hair, and those conniving, trying-to-catch-him,
brown eyes.
Yes, he knew what it was she wanted, and the kid prob-


WEED
ably wanted by now, having listened to her bitch about it
all his life.
And he wasn't going to give them the only thing he
had left.
“Ned, we wouldn't even have to sleep in the same bed, if
you hate me that much.”
“Hate has nothing to do with it,” he said, in a press,
uneasy in his easy chair (and he remembered Frank Sinatra
had sung that somewhere). “You know I couldn't marry
you now, even if I wanted to. How the hell could I stand
the expense?”
"It's your kid, Ned,” she droned.
“Damn it! Don't you think I know that?” he shouted.
“Of all the things I know about you, don't you think I
know that best?”
“You owe it to him !” .
"Listen, Doris, I owe you what you're gettin-sixty-five
bucks a month, from me. And what are you doin? You're
spendin that to follow me here from Detroit, just blowin
it up, tryin to make me do somethin you know I won't do
in the first place."
Her eyes blinked at him, then had a shiny film. “Do you
know what it's like? No, Ned, you don't know what it's
like and you don't give a damn. Living with my mother
and father, livin offa them. And here I am, twenty-five
years old. Eatin offa old folks!”
"Stop it!” he snapped out at her.
“Well, it's true,” she said in a blue, moaning, breaking,
last-breath voice. “I'm sittin right in the middle of nothin,
Ned. I don't belong to anything."
“Goddamn it, Doris,” he said, getting up, “can't you
understand that I want my freedom?”
Then she blazed; her face reddened as she stared at
him and mouthed the words: “And I want other kids to
stop calling my son a bastard, that's what I want!”
Of course he knew it was useless to go on, and so did
she, after a while.
He didn't love her.


20
CLARENCE L. COOPER, JR.
ing his eyes around redly in his head, but he found himself
in an instant, and stood looking down at the table, at the
girl in the centerpage of Jet.
His throat felt warm and dry, and he felt like a beer.
But the albums ...
And he retraced his steps to his desk, resigned all of a
sudden, out of necessity, to something he could no longer
avoid.
A bell rang, but it wasn't his phone, halting him abruptly
as it tanged away in his head. He stood waiting. It was like
ground shocks from an explosion, like something he re-
membered from another country, and his kid's eyes look-
ing on it all, a tiny, closed-mouth people, abjectly opened-
faced as they watched all they had be destroyed. Korea.
Ned sat down again, thrust down by the chapel chime.
And the faces of those people, that was the important
thing about it all. You never know what a man is made of
until you see his insides, their rare, purpled redness, and
sloshed muck left by a fifty caliber. No. Or just a man
dying.
And I was a kid, Ned Land thought, seeing it all again,
remembering the crying tears a man never loses, always
the childish crybaby within from life's inherent anguish.
He remembered:
BLACK BOYS DYIN!
“Hit hard on that left flank, Ned! You got a rod up
yo ass? Push that goddamn platoon, ya hear me!”
"You don't have to be scared not like me, you don't!”
"C'mon, boy, I mean it! This is Sarge talkin' to ya! Dig
them sonsabitchin Chinks out! You do what I tell ya! White
folks watchin us! We gone show 'em! Take that hill!”
And they took it.
A bell rang.
Ned Land felt his insides churning.
It wasn't really so bad, not when you took a good look
at it. Man, you listen to those sounds in yourself and you'll
go crazy! No, you can't listen. This goddamn good weed ...
Sarge, blacked-faced, shiny like his own hunches under


WEED
21.
the eyes, but Sarge's was perpetual. Georgia nigger, tough
with Georgia-nigger perseverance. A man to be respected,
and yet when Ned stood over him there, trying to crouch
at the same time to keep out of the line of fire, and feeling
a chilly, world's-end horror of what he saw was left of
Sarge, his half-head carried away like that from mortar
shrapnel a man who was to be detested, a thing to be
loathed, a loamlike mushy feces.
Oh, Lord!
With white folks watchin, like a battle Royal, ring fulla
niggers killin each other!
And remember the Chink Lieutenant, the one who said
he'd been educated at Oxford and acquired his accent
while learning English? And when they flushed the bunker,
and Brother Red, who took over after Sarge, with freckles
and the long grin, from Royal Oak, salted it out with his
Tommy, and they found the fat little Looey cowering in a
corner near the radio set-up, and the way, when he saw
them, he said, “Oh, I thought you chaps'd be somewhere in
the backlines, shooting craps!"
And Brother Red started to kill him, then saw the guy
was doing it on purpose. And didn't.
Ned Land began to laugh, not on his own: the Boo
made him laugh like that, for no reason.
The bell rang once more.
Warm mud warming boots ankle high, as they moved
toward the Buddhist church in Kwihan, leaning, broken
spire from tank fire, but still intact. The sun was red hot,
burning, antithesis of the freezing winter of a few days
before. Slowly moving in that warm mud, with Brother
Red chewing on a dead rice reed, hefting that dirty blas-
phemy of steel and explosive lovingly, unleashed passion
of the kill like a kiss on his sandy, freckled face.
Oh, God, the way they killed!
Easy out. Okay. Hands high. Get 'em up, you punk.
He can't understand you.
High, I said!
He don't dig English, man.
the bahe said, the radiod the fat oak, saltarse, with bunker


22
CLARENCE L COOPER, JR.
Hold it, Red! Don't shoot him!
Katahkatahkatahkatahkatahkatah.
Hey, look out! Up there, by the bell!
Red raising Tommy; Tommy talking. Two men in six
seconds.
Katahkatahkatahtah.
Blood, from up there, splattered down in Ned's looking
face.
The body slumped, lifeless, as though it had always been
so, falling as only a body without life can fall. Against the
bell.
And the bell began to ring.
They ran and dug in, away from the falling grenade, and
they covered up, until they realized it had been a dud.
And that had been the last time he had heard that bell,
ringing, accusing, cursing, damning all of them, until now,
right here in his record shop, in Westphalia, Michigan..
Ned rose, feeling that thing again, that what-the-hell-
was-it feeling of loss. A man never got hard, no matter
how many tough outer crusts he grew in defense. There
always seemed to be a chink somewhere, a little defect,
open and suppurating, that drew in the germs which could
fester.
He looked at what was left of the joint, the roach, and
decided to let it ride, being as low as he was. He could
utilize it later.
Again, this thinking that Gangster gave him.
Kill every goddamn one of 'em, Red had said. We'd get
court martialed if we shot who we'd like to shoot. Kill 'em;
they're the closest thing to white a black man can kill.
And before: “It's crazy, killin this way,” Sarge said.
"Crazy man kills the only thing he got.”
Ned whirled round his shop, looking frantically for
something that did not exist. He closed his eyes, and was
high again, thinking about Velma, the white wife of Ruck-
son's happy Brazilian, and what he could do with her to
help himself forget that he couldn't forget.
That integrated Army, like a big joke laughing at itself.


WEED
And he remembered, for some reason, that he had hated
Brother Red. That Kankill sonofabitch-like God, he was!
that smell of creosote and pestilence about him. Where was
he now? In Ford's, Chrysler's or one of GM's plants in
Detroit? Sweating the dollars down through his red skin
by the hour, all twisted and hunched in a contortion under
the body bridges of a Plymouth, wrenching against the
criminal resistance of new nuts and bolts?
And him like God, the red-black bastard!
Oh, Lord, Ned said inside, I didn't want to kill that man.
Please believe me when I say it: that man, that kid, that
little almond-eyed boy, only a few years older than David,
and the big silly automatic in his two hands, and him prob-
ably high off an opium smoke a few minutes ago, and
thinking that this was HIS world, that nobody else counted,
not when they defied your reason for existence. This, along
with the charge of sweet-tasting ope, still there in his hot
mouth, cleansing it with terrified compulsion, then ...
A nigger in a foul U. S. Infantry uniform, standing there
with the M2, turning, frightened, and giving way to the
squeeze of terror latent in finger ....
Then a man with a cause killed by a man without one.
The way he looked. Ned Land knew the look of a new
baby, all curled and fetal-formed, because he had seen
pictures in high school of babies that way, and he knew
the close association, that feeling that he was there once,
and the thin division of man and babe.
Then, this dead boy: he was Ned Land, there, so beau-
tiful in spite of the two slugs in his guts, in spite of the mud,
and the stink of a body somewhere, and, off to the side,
the picturesque block patterns of rice paddies. Here, dead,
gone, with a smear of mud on his right cheek, like a little
kid who had played longer than his mother intended.
Mother and death, lying there, fetal-formed. The burpgun
he carried had flown from the body with the momentum
of the M2's slugs, and now stood upright in the mud, like
a steel flower, like the stick of surrender, or grave, in some
child's game.


Two
DUCKSON'S EYES WERE TWO GLEAMS that never flick-
Il ered, and so sure in perspective his hand never
faltered. He may have been littler than most men, but on
a pool table he was huger than God and twice as mighty.
Snock. Cue ball in the face of the eightball cross-corner.
That was the third successive plunk.
Ruckson stood back on strong bowlegs and faintly
smiled around his cigarette at the dark faces hovering tor-
soless in pooltable light, and his opponent, Black Casey
from Grand Rapids, fresh out on a seasonal tour of the
Midwest and very unhip to the hands that held his fate.
That was the way. most pool hustlers got cut down, and
Casey hadn't become aware that he'd victimized his own
bankroll in a subtle, smalltown cross until Ruckson's stick
of genius began to cut it out from under him, a hundred
at a time.
The gamekeeper clicked a disc over on the wire line
with the tip of a poolstick and said quietly, in Ruckson's
favor, “Three.”
Casey, a tall, darkskinned man, no longer young, the
anxiousness for his fading youth evident in features that
were thickly troubled, eyed the smoothness of the last shot-
in ball.
25


30
CLARENCE L. COOPER, JR.
"Yeah, man. It wasn't too late when I found that out,
and when I did I got right out and went back where I came
from.” His face became shadows, except for the whites of
his eyes aš he looked, remembering, to the evening tran-
quility of the small town street. “You know one thing?
There ain't no dirt in New York. I mean, not dirt like
here: somethin you can dig your toe down in and see
that it's black or that bugs live in it or that somethin will
grow in it. The only dirt New York has is in the center
of the tenements and apartments, and you'd never know
it was there, passing down the street-unless you lived in
one of the rear rooms or apartments. Then all you'd see
is bastard trees or somebody's face starin at yours from a
window. That's what I had,” Casey said, “a room on the
third floor lookin out at a brick wall and one window
where some spic family lived. In the mornin, I woke up
to Spanish music on the radio. There was another window
I couldn't see that was open and had another Spanish sta-
tion goin. Down below me, a bunch of faggots lived, always
partyin with the radio turned to rock-and-roll. I got up
and went to bed with all this stuff. All night long, you
could hear the garbage fallin from windows ... bottles
crashin in the catwalks. Voices. Some screamin-all fightin.
Here's some nigger callin a broad a mothereff and some
broad callin a nigger a mothereff. All night, Mr. Ruckson.
It got to the place where my room was full of the smell
of garbage—till the walls kinda taperecorded the spic
music and punk musicmand I went to the streets, tryin to
find what I couldn't find inside the four walls."
Ruckson unhappily knew what Casey was speaking of,
and he sat back to listen, as though paying some sort of
special penance.
“I went to the streets, tryin to find a little dirt to jam
my fingers in,” Casey recalled quietly. “But Central Park
was the only place I could find it. And at that time of
day, it was gettin dark. I didn't find no dirt, not dirt like I
thought about it, not in the way I had come to think
about God and dirt together. But I did find green, wild


WEED
33
around for him to find but because fate knows once he's
found it he'll stop lookin, and a man standin in the middle
of the road gets in somebody's way, somebody who's got
to go on a helluva lot further. Me and you, we've passed a
half hundred. We know what we want, but we can't stop.
That's what we're afraid of, the stoppin.
“Take Ned Land, there,” he nodded. “He's close to me
not because I mighta been him; he's close because he's
everything I could'a been, because he never started lookin
-he was smart enough to get scared right at the begin-
ning.”
"One day he'll have to,” Casey said.
"Maybe. But maybe life'll kill him before that happens.”
Casey laughed softly. “If you try to interrupt her plan,
shell kill you, too. What she does to that Land might make
you curse, Mr. Ruckson, but there ain't nothin you can
do about it. All a man can do is dream his own dream
and stay away from other people, no matter how hard
they get shook by the neck."
Near the edge of town a train hooted a distant whistle.
"That's my voice callin,” Casey said. “I've been answerin
for a long time now, and I guess I'll be answerin it for a
long time to come. One day, I'm sure, it'll leave me stand-
in in the middle of the road. But I gained sense enough,
now, to step out of the path of others who still got a little
way to travel.” He stuck out his hand. “I'll be seein you,
Mr. Ruckson-in case we're both goin the same way.”
In Ruckson's hand, as they shook, were two bills. But
Casey acted as though he had not noticed and turned to
walk with heavy, moderately long strides down the dark-
ening street.
Ruckson watched until the man turned at a far corner,
and stood seeing nothingness for a long time after.
He finally turned to walk slowly in the opposite direc-
tion, pulling the mild evening calm down deeply to his
lungs. He did not recall Casey's face or the mouth that
said them, but the words that belonged only to the big


Three
TT WAS EVENING AND TIME FOR HIS SHIFT, and he felt it
I rising in his throat already, that desire, that something
he couldn't beat down for her. And shame.
All alone in the big house his father had built, Detective
Cullen could almost imagine a remonstrative voice as he
shaved and prepared to leave for work. Sometimes he
almost seemed to hear the damn thing coming out of the
picture of his old man, The Preacher. Surely, that's whose
voice it was if it was anybody's voice at all.
He'd been wanting to move out of the house ever since
the old man had died ten years before, but there was an
aunt Maida he'd have to deal with, and a couple of the
city fathers, banking brothers, who held the mortgage.
He hated the goddamn place.
He wiped and looked at his face in the inlaid bathroom
mirror and listened to the whiskery water gurgle out of
the ancient bowl, and it seemed that the grimy bubbly
sounds accompanied the fringes and hollows of his face,
which, considering the small head, was so completely out
of proportion to the rest of the pudgy body.
Eighteen rooms and one man.
He wiped his face thoroughly dry and brushed his teeth
and combed his straight brown hair with water. Again, as
35


36
CLARENCE L. COOPER, JR.
he thought of her, a voice seemed to chide, but he went
right on thinking of her anyway, because what else was
there for him to consider in a place like this?
Creepy damn house. He hadn't gotten over it yet, not
even this long. He felt a blush come over his face as he
thought of how he slept sometimes with his head under
the covers . . . as though he expected to look up some
night and see him, the old man, standing over the bed like
he used to do when he was a kid, and asking him whether
he remembered to say his prayers.
Even now he said his prayers, just to make sure that
the old bastard wouldn't come around checking up.
He almost hated the memory of his old man, regretting
that he knew little of the soft woman that was his mother
before she died. But that old man ...
Detective Cullen came out of the bathroom into his
first floor bedroom and began to dress. He wasn't in any
special hurry, so he took his time, picking out something
to wear. It was all ill-matched, the stuff he chose, but it was
neat, and the sport coat was large enough to hide his
schmoo belly and the .38 revolver he was forced to wear.
He had never liked guns, and sometimes he faked, wearing
only the holster and a lighter plastic replica. In a larger
city, of course, you couldn't do that, but here in West-
phalia eight policemen were all that was needed to take
care of any trouble they were bound to have. Chief Bel-
mont was never finicky about anything, and he particularly
gave Cullen a lot of elbow room, since he and The Preacher
had been close friends.
The Preacher.
Cullen sat on the bed and closed his eyes tight as he
pulled on a sock. Actually, he didn't feel like a detective,
for he had never stopped feeling like The Preacher's son.
And this had complications in a job in which you were
supposed to be a tough guy, or impressive enough at least
to make people respect you as a stern individual.
Cullen knew he was lucky. In a big city department, he
wouldn't have lasted a week. But here in Westphalia it was
lucky. In Stern ind enough


38 CLARENCE L. COOPER, JR.
before strapping it on, then lighted a cigarette. Through
his raised front windows he could hear an organ grinder
passing, and the music made a pleasantness course through
him suddenly, and the smoke from the cigarette gave a
good brown smart to his tongue.
He passed through the crinoline curtains to the front
hall and adjusted his hat in the full length mirror there
before going out. He usually felt ambiguously thrilled at
this moment, enjoying and deploring the action, remem-
bering that his father had done it, and he had seen it done,
a million times.
Then he passed out, locking the door behind him, pulling
in the fresh air of nightside deeply.
He noted with a slight satisfaction that the grass needed
cutting and the picket fence could stand a new coat of
paint. He could remember when these things had been
done regularly, but he could not remember the last time
he had done them.
What was nice about Westphalia was, it was small and
comfy. At thirty-nine, Cullen had come to a ledge of life
that demanded no interference with routine. The only
thing that impaired his sensitivity was the house with the
red light in the window, and he didn't count this as a
difference, or a bother. It was. It must be.
Pleasure.
Peace.
The night was wonderful as he walked.
“Hi, Officer Cullen."
"Hi, Joe," Officer Cullen said.
He walked briskly to the police station off Main street,
glad that he was alive and glad, in a way, that the old
man was dead.
The thing that shook his serenity was Bill Mullin's face
when he came in, and Bill came over to him, with a look
on his pan that made it look cracked in several places.
“Hi, Cull?”
“Whatsa matter, Bill?”
“The Chief wants to see us, boy.”
thing that
the window it was.


CLARENCE L. COOPER, JR.
room where the red light burned. “She'll be out in a min-
ute. C'mon in and hava drink.”
Cullen followed her through.
In one corner was a bar, where Mama Harper seated
herself. Cullen could never get over the feeling that she
stared through him when he came around, but his sense of
fear was overshadowed by his sense of authority. It was
he who let Mama's whorehouse operate undisturbed, and
it was Wanda who prompted his presence here.
In the corner, a stereo phonograph began to play loud,
fusion-like jazz, and the various weird sounds cascaded
against the sensitivity of his inner ear.
“How's the police business, boy?" Mama grinned whitely
at him from behind the bar.
“Still arresting,” Cullen said, but doubted whether she
got the point.
“Wanna drink?"
"Not tonight, Mama, I'm just startin on my tour. Maybe
I'll stop around later."
"Lorraine,” Mama hollered, and a svelt brown girl came
to stand smiling within the Chinese curtains.
"Tell Wanda to hurry,” the big woman said. “She know
Mr. Cullen got his business to tend to."
The girl left while Cullen sat down.
"What's new?” he said.
“Nothin now," Mama said. “But we coulda used you
the other night-a trick got bad, and we had to hire a
man off the street to get him outta here."
“Anytime you have trouble,” Cullen told her, "you just
call the station—the desk sergeant and I are pretty good
friends, and he'll send somebody around. Don't worry
about anything."
“I sure appreciate that, boy. C'mon, have a drink. This
is on me.”
He stood and went over to the bar. “Make it bourbon,
Mama, and a quickie.”
She poured and he drank. The music swelled within the


WEED
room. He looked within the black woman's face and found
her grinning at him.
“Wanda'll be along, boy. Yes, yes. Ain't that right?”
He shifted nervously. "That's right, Mama.”
The curtains parted and Wanda stepped in, almost tall
in a tight red dress but very wide across the hips, a dark
brownskinned woman with big breasts that stood upright
and a face as untroubled as ice cream.
"Hello,” she said.
""H’lo,” Cullen said. Then, quickly, “Wanna see you for
a minute."
“Let's go to my room."
“Well, I only wanna stay for a minute."
“As long as you want is all right with me.”
“Remember you owe me a dollar for that drink,” Mama
called out behind him.
Wanda's room was a green light that permeated the
bed and furnishings and warmly entered him.
"I just thought I'd stop around,” he said, grinning nerv-
ously.
She sat on the bed with her beautiful legs apart. "I won-
dered why you haven't been around since the last time."
“They've got me on special duty, Wanda . . . You
know I would have been around before now.”
"I've missed you," she said, but he could not see her
face distinctly in the green glow, and he felt the rising
thrill of himself underneath.
He went to sit on the bed next to her.
“Look," he said, finding his words hard to capture.
“Wanda . . . you know I like you a whole lot.”
“You seem like it.”
“Well, I do, I do! I want you to know that.”
“Is there something you want to tell me?"
“Yes. Well, yes, there is. There may be a little trouble
in town. I want you to keep your ears open.”
“Is that what you wanted to tell me?”
“Well, yes,” he said. “I want you to help me all you


CLARENCE L. COOPER, JR.
can, you know what I mean? I just don't want any trouble
here in Westphalia.”
She leaned her face close to his. “What else do you want
to tell me?”
He could not speak for a long time.
“Do you want to tell me you've missed me?”
“Yes, that, too. You know I like to come and see
you.” He began to feel awkward.
“How much do you like to come see me?"
"Jesus, Wanda, you know how much. I've never lied
to you, have I?”
"I don't know ..."
"Listen, you believe it, I've never lied to you. I don't
care . . . you know what I don't care about. I think
you're swell. Well, hell, you know what I mean, I don't
come in here to take anything. I have a sense of values,
Wanda. I know what you do, and you know what I do, but
that doesn't keep us from being good friends."
“I like you a lot, Cullen."
“That's the way I feel about you, Wanda."
They were silent, looking at each other.
After a while, she said, “Is there something you want
me to do for you?"
But he felt a voice, and could not answer immediately.
“I'm supposed to be on tour, honey."
“Would you like to stay for a while?”
"Hell, you know I would, but-"
“I won't keep you long."
"Wanda ..."
“Yes?”
“I want you to know ..."
“What do you want me to know?"
"I want you to know I think you're a fine person. You
know.”
"I know that you mean what you're saying.”
“Well, I don't care what anybody else says, and you
don't have to worry about anybody else, you or anybody
in this house, not as long as I'm on the force.”


WEED
43
She made her hand come to his chest and pressed it
palm-flat there.
"None of us can help who we are,” she said.
He touched her hand, and then her arm, then he seized
her and kissed her mouth.
"You can stay with me if you want to," she said.
"I want to,” he breathed heavily.
She rose, and he watched as she began to undress, ex-
posing the wonders of her smooth body in the green light.
Her breasts had nipples like the caps of gushers, and her
belly was a wonderful, black, inverted pyramid.
He held his breath, and she took one of his hands and
made it come across one smooth hock of her wide behind.
He smelled a quiet perfume emanating from the lower part
of her as she stood before him.
And then he was breathing hard, grasping her around
the hips with both arms and kissing her belly.
“I'm yours," she said. “Just tell me what you want me
to do.”
As he undressed, he repressed the shrill, sanctimonious
voice of his dead father, aware only of the golden brown
gift that lay awaiting him on the green covers.


Four
ORIS SAW THE CURTAINS GO DOWN in the record
shop, and she saw the lights go out eventually. And
she stood in the shadows. From where she was, Ned
couldn't see her, she knew, Her hand went to one of her
small breasts.
Oh, a blues was going around through her head, and
she couldn't get rid of it, a crying thing, a pleading line,
a dazzle of earthy words for a woman.
You knows you mine, dear,
Don't care what you say.
I'm gonna win you, on
My lucky day.
Caterpillar Daddy,
You got yo squeeze on me.
Gee, gee. That was the way, the way she would round
it out. Geee, geee, with that deep tone. She had a talent
for singing; she even won a couple of amateur contests,
just like Ella.
What she could do with that song. Maybe that's why it


WEED
45
kept going around for her: it wanted to be done. Funny
how she kept thinking she should do something. Funny
with David, and Ned, even. Funny that she should think
of being that way, when really, all she wanted was Ned.
Oh, that little black man!
You knows you mine, dear.
And why she needed to have him so, she didn't know.
Maybe it was the way some men leave a woman, pulled
and stretched, exhausted, worn, used. The way they went
into you and dug everything out, then twisted it like wet
laundry.
After that first time, and even after David, she knew
she had to have Ned.
Doris warmed herself in the shadows, waiting.
Over the night-tight city of Westphalia, Northern Lights
seemed to be a blinking part of the sky. Slow moving, lazy
early summer evening, the turgid moving of summer-struck
people on the neoned streets. Doris thought everybody
looked like they liked everybody else, this evening. Only,
there was a rain in her heart, and she could almost smell
it on the air. And she watched it all avidly, knowing how
Ned loved to watch the night.
Ned saying what he said yesterday, he shouldn't have
said it. There seemed to be no way of explaining it, the
way she felt, with the few scanty words of her mind. She
was here, and Ned was here, and it was religionlike, like
the sanctity of the baptismal, the drowning choke of holy
water.
Almost eight years ago, Ned had had her, had made of
her, and that was all Doris needed, openly exposed to the
moving power of the flesh and the heart, pushed on in her
actions by some heathen feminine worship of woman's
need to be owned, absorbed, by man.
Oh, how he had wrung her out.
Again her eyes strayed toward the shop. And she saw
a movement at the door across the street. Then she hid
herself more deeply in the dark.
Her mind was a heroin haze as she remembered, for she
ctity of the baas here, and it rds of her mind


WEED
It was so easy to see why it had to be this way. Her
song for the world was taken from her, and she could
have been immortal, like Ella or Billie Holiday, or even
Bessie Smith; seen Paris, or South America, maybe, like
Josephine Baker; or done that real thing for the world
-take out the heart and give it-like Marian Anderson:
this was the life of her stolen song, peopled with the throng
of Love's many-billion children.
This she had given to Ned Land, and because of it she
was dead.
She had every right to haunt him. Though there was
much more she couldn't explain—so much that was a
tone, a resonance, a triumphant sound of grinding finality:
so much, so much. So much that was David, Ned, the
both of them, and more of herself than she had ever
dreamed would be.
And why wouldn't he see that? Didn't he see that David
was her own indelible failure? In everything?
Oh, Lord, God, she could remember when she used
to live on Cameron Street, and that old rickety house there,
with the big rats that used to sit at the bottom of the base-
ment steps, their eyes gleaming in the dark, looking up at
her, defying her to panic them into flight. Like they were
saying, C'mon. C'mon down here, you, I'll eat your ass off.
And right on the corner there was a bar, with a local
vocalist, and (Doris remembered she had just graduated
from Sherrard Intermediate, still wore the white fluffy thing
resplendent about her smooth yellow legs) she used to
hear this woman going on with that doing-it, deep, breast-
soft voice, late into the night, from her bed by the street
window.
And it was then she thought: “Nothing could make me
do anything more than what I should do: like you. Nothing
could mean more than what you tell me to do."
And now she looked over at the shop, wondering at the
thing that made her turn from that woman, and her pledge,
her eyes hungry with the transference of this great love,


Five
NTED CAME OUT, THE DOOR slow in clicking behind
V him. He checked it with a backward hand and con-
tinued on.
Late, and nothing done. Nothing but Pot smoked, burned
up in twisting headbands of nothing but disturbance. Still,
he carried a joint in his pocket, for later, for the other
hours when he would need to be unlike himself.
The ashlike sky reminded him of burning coals of weed.
That rain was coming, fast. Despite the parent sky, the city
was dark and impenetrable, like the humps and crevices
of a deep cavern.
The green light across the street blinked at him as he
walked away. The whore shadow on the flecked-coal sky
seemed the bent head of a woman.
Ned paused.
What now? His room, with the record album covers
plastering the roach homes of the upturned, dirty green
wall papers? This much didn't seem to be enough just now.
His separate eyes saw the woman's head nod behind him
with his going steps.
Coral?
Was that what he wanted? Yes, that was what he wanted,
but not like she would do it, not with her sucking mouth


WEED
51
Ned went up the steep steps, cursing himself, and think-
ing what was left after the twenty-eight dollars. But it was
too late now, and he wondered how long it had been too
late for him.
He rang the old cowbells and waited. Lorraine came,
and she smiled when she saw who he was.
"Hi, c'mon in." Her wide, red whore mouth pursed,
O-like, as though she were drawing in on him, as though
he were a cigarette. “Well, c'mon in, daddy.”
He came.
“Wanda?” She stopped him in the hall, that way she did
sometimes, testing him, letting him bump up against her
plump buttocks in that tight black dress, letting his loins
and thighs rub against her for a long time. “Nobody but
Wanda, huh? What's Wanda got?”
“Nothing special,” he said.
“I just can't understand it,” she said, watching him side-
ways, her eyes flickering a bit wantonly over her commer-
cial mouth, still leaning hard against him. “What Wanda
can do, I can do,” she assured him, sticking her tongue out
a little past her lips.
“Better?” said Ned.
"If I have to.”
She tore away from him, and it was almost like the
parting of two sticky fingers. “Wanda's upstairs. She'll be
right down."
Chinese curtains filtered the livingroom light, red from
the candle in the front window and the red bulb of the
overhead ceiling light. Cushions everywhere. Mama Har-
per was behind the bar, big and black, a nightmare female,
illumed in the work of her daughters and something blue
and funky from Miles Davis, on the stereo, a long time ago.
“Hi, boy."
"Hi, Mama.” Ned walked over. "I think Davis was a
young trumpet then; I got the album over at the shop.
A man ages in everything, you know, Mama?”
“That's the truth, boy, you take my word for it,” Mama
Harper said in a voice that was as big as she was. Her
youngan ages in everydy, you take my big as she w


52
CLARENCE L. COOPER, JR.,
eyes twinkled in the blackness and distortion of her face;
her huge breasts were animated under the simple print,
bursting about her. “Wanna drink, boy?”
“I'd like a Scotch, but my money's kinda short."
“Don't worry 'bout nothin," Mama said. “You can pay
me some other time. You'll be back, boy. You'll be back.”
Ned noticed again, with fascination, how white her hair
was. Mama. And she truly was to Lorraine and Wanda
Terry, whom he saw at work rarely. And there was Denise,
who was her daughter too, now a big-time whore in New
York, in a mixed call chain. Lois, and Carla, the white
girl, didn't count, since Mama picked them up off the street,
gave them a meal, now fed from them.
And again he marveled at how they, her daughters, all
of them, could have come in their beauty from the ghastly
wound of Mama Harper. Mama told him once, how they
all had different fathers. Trick babies. And yet, so all alike,
as though one starving man had waxed magical with his
hunger and flushed Mama Harper with his immense vex.
ation, and love. And that four were the daughters of love.
Ned turned from her, as her fat black fingers handed
him the glass, and as he could look at her no longer. He
sipped, and the whiskey inflamed the marijuana he had
smoked a little while before. The room only gradually
turned redder, and Ned belched an aftertaste of Pot. His
stomach began to swell a little. He went to sit on the couch.
Miles was swinging along in a bluesy groove, talking in
that funny voice, like an infant crying in the night, twisting
away into unheard of things.
"Now what do I ask you?” Mama grinned over at him.
“You ask me if that is nice,” Ned said.
"And what do you say, boy?”
"I say I can't explain it, Mama. It's too beautiful. I never
was no poet or anything."
“Man is poetry, boy!” She squinted an eye at him across
the room, like one light going out, then on again. “What
you talkin 'bout?” in that child-chiding way she had.
Ned smiled, mostly from the Boo again.


56
CLARENCE L. COOPER, JR.
pre-empted her words with a wicked A-minor intro. It
sounded like Sonny Rollins too, on tenor.
Again, Mama opened her mouth, but this time she did
not exist for him. He rose to Wanda's hand, and stood
there, close to her. The music swelled around him as he
looked down in her painted face, green with orange, al-
most, and her lips so red, so deep and red.
“You must be nuts, Ned."
“Why?” he said.
“To feel this way.” She shook her head, sad for him. “I
don't know, baby.”
“You've got me in the wrong boat,” he said over her,
smelling the whiskey smell of his breath as it glanced
against her face. “When I was a little kid, my old man
and my uncle used to fish on Belle Isle. I was suppose
to stay in the boat with my old man and the other kids,
but all the time I seemed to get out there in my uncle's
boat some way. That's like you.”.
“I know what kinda guy you are; don't you try to tell
me," she said. Her fingers closed on his. “You're makin
this hard for both of us.”.
"Well, get out!" Mama Harper called to them, aggra-
vated. “Don't make it hard for me to lissen!”
“C'mon,” Wanda said softly.
"That's a buck for the drink, boy,” Mama reminded
him.
"I won't forget," Ned answered behind.
In the hall they met Lorraine with a streetside trick, a
regular customer, like Ned, who felt about Lorraine, he
imagined, the same way he felt about Wanda. They bowed
their heads with customer politeness.
“How's the weather out?” Ned said.
“Rainin now,” the man told him.
“You shoulda worn a raincoat or something," Wanda
told Ned. “You'll get wet when you leave.”
“Maybe it'll be over then,” Ned hoped.
A piano solo, from the inner room, compounded their
attention.


WEED
57
“C'mon,” Wanda said.
He followed her into a ground floor room of green light,
one shaded window and nice curtains, and that broad,
made-up ironing board flat bed. The covers were unwrin-
kled. Wanda sat, one round firm thigh over another.
"You know,” she said, looking up at him, “I been think-
in since you were here last week.”
"About what?”
"About you, mostly. I mean—the nice things you do,
Ned.”
"I hoped you were liking it,” he said, misunderstanding
her.
“You got a cigarette?”
· He gave her one.
“It's not so much what you mean, Ned. You know what
I mean? A woman has a hundred men, two hundred. It's
all the same. Once in a while, some is better than most,
but she tries not to think of that. After it's over, two or
three weeks later, she takes off to the doc and lets him clean
her button. And it's like none of it ever was.” Her eyes
sparkled in the green light. “What I'm talkin about is
something else, honey.”
Ned's ear harkened to the sound of her words and the
music that was filtering in under the door, through the
walls: to him, it seemed like all the places of the earth-
her words, the music, his heart beating hard.
“You got a light?” she said.
He lighted the cigarette for her.
“Thanks.” She blew out an abundant cloud of blue-green
smoke. "I hope you know what I mean.”
"I'm tryin to."
Her eyes looked up at him, and he saw that they were
people eyes, with moisture in them, just like his own; and
her nose, just above the cleft of her top lip, had film from
the warmth of her nostrils.
“You're being a sonofabitch, Ned!” she burst out in a
harsh voice, lowering her head.


58
CLARENCE L. COOPER, JR.
He dropped to his knees in front of her. "I'm not, baby,
please believe me, I'm not.”
She raised her eyes and looked at him, found the corners
of his face in the green light, traced it lovingly, as though
she had tissue paper over a map.
"You been smokin reefer, Ned. I can always tell; your
eyes get red.”
“Yeah, I sure have."
"Do you like it that way?”.
“It serves,” he said.
“Will you understand what I say?"
“Yes, Wanda, go on. I know everything you're talkin
about.”
His hands gripped hers in her soft lap; then her hands
came away and went under his coat, around his chest, up
his throat to his chin, the hands perfumed, touching on his
mouth, a finger feather-brushing the entrance of a nostril;
up over his black skin they crawled, to the edges of his
eyes, around them, cool palms on the sides of his cheeks,
pressing his face inward with sudden intensity, then on
to his hair, short and napped, and he felt her nails at his
scalp, tearing into it. Then she pulled his head into her
breasts, mouth and nose within the crevice, as though he
were the child that had just sprung from her, and he felt
her trembling under his hands, her belly quivering.
"Ned, understand," she begged, tearing him from her,
colored above him with a queer thing that distorted her face
and made it look more beautiful. “Black man outta no-
where, doin this to me,” She made her mouth go over
his, grease of her lipstick swelling his mouth with its sweet
taste, and her tongue.
And she caught bits of his short hair as she pulled away
from him, and said, her eyes crying, “You crazy bastard.
I love you. Do you understand that? Isn't that as silly as
hell? I'd die for you, Ned. ..."
Outside, in the rain, Doris watched the house of joy.


WEED
61
and the fingers creeped upward, turning the slopes and
ridges of her upper thigh and belly, like the members of a
practiced caravan. Then stopped at the jungle edge of
pubic hair.
“Why don't you let me get some rest?” she said in a
tired voice.
“That's all you get is rest,” he said. “Whadda you
mean leave you get some rest?”
"Oh, Burris.”
“No, I wanna know just what the hell you mean. Rest!
What do you need rest for? What do you do around this
joint that takes so much outta you that you say you gotta
have some rest?"
“Burris, it's five o'clock in the mornin.”
"I know what time it is. Don't you think I know? I
gotta get outta here in a few minutes and get to work. I
know what it means to want some rest. Twelve hours a
day.”
"Are you complainin?" she said in a graty voice.
"I'm not complainin about anything but the fact that
you got to have so much goddamned rest."
“Now, listen,” she said, rising up on an elbow, “there's
a lot of things you don't think about and a lot of things you
don't understand. You don't have to live here twenty-four
hours a day. You got your meat to chop up, and every
other thing you wanna do with it. You got that. Now what
have I got? Burris, I'm a young woman. I'm not gonna
be used up the way I've seen other women used up.”
Now he rose, half sitting. “Oh, as long as you're used
up by some other man, is that it?”
"Oh, you're talking crazy as hell ..."
“Crazy, huh?” he said, his eyes big. "Crazy, is that what
you think I am? You don't think I know, do you? You
don't think I know about him?”
"Him, who?” she said with big clear eyes.
"Him!” he exploded. “You know who the hell I'm talkin
about! You know good and goddamn well who HIM is,
and don't you try to tell me you don't!”


WEED
She was trying to confuse him; even through his anger,
he knew that.
He shook his finger at her, like a whip. “You better be
goddamned careful what you do from now on, Coral, I
MEAN THAT!”
She went out of the room, and the old floor creaked its
boards at her barefoot steps.
“You better remember that!” he yelled after her.
He knew where she was going, just right down the hall,
and in a little while he heard the hissing sounds when she
released her urine.
In their attic rooms above the other sleeping tenants,
or those who couldn't sleep because of them, Burris. lay
spread-eagled in the bed, boiling with a dangerous mad.
The clock began to alarm on the bureau, a quarter to six,
and he let it ring until it rang down.
“Why didn't you shut it off?” she said as she came
back in.
"I just guess you don't know he uses dope;" he said,
sitting up on the bed, facing her as she came over to the
bureau to take out fresh panties and bra.
She turned her head toward him. “Who, Burris? Who
uses dope?”
The sides of his jaws began to tremble. “That record
shop fella, that Ned Land, that guy who's been getting into
your lyin drawers!"
“You can just go to hell if you have to talk to me that
way!”
“Oh, don't be so holy with me,” he said, shaking a fist
at her. “I know things about him you don't even know!"
She slammed a drawer. “Goddamn it all right back to
God!”
"He uses dope,” Burris said again. “Yeah! Reefer. He
smokes reefers!” ,
“I guess you seen him," she hollered at him.
“Yeah, I seen him!”
“Don't you tell that goddamn lie, Burris, because you
know that's all it is!”


WEED
69
Mike, big young Italian, bigger than Burris, stood look-
ing down on him as he opened up the meat market with
one of the keys on the ring with the one he had his Cadillac
key on. “How's everything?”
"Everything's goin fine, Mike.”
“Let's rake 'em in, boy,” Mike said, wide white grin.
“That's really what we're gonna do today, Mike.”
Mike became confidential. “Listen, kid, I've got some
things I've got to take care of. You pull in three hundred
behind the meat rack today and I'll give you twenty-five
bucks.”
"You're throwin your money away,” Burris told him.
“We'll make that easy."
“Don't mind about that, Burr," Mike said. "Just make
that three hundred for me."
One of the white butchers came in.
“Hi, Joe!” Mike hollered.
“Hi, Mike!”
"Rake 'em in today, boy!”
"Don't you worry, boss."
.. Burris went over behind the wholesale counter, hung
up his coat and hat, then went over to the main counter
where he found an unbloodied apron. Side meat came in
two minutes later, and he had to cut the strip in two, and
later carve the carcass crossways. He had begun to work
even before opening time at seven-thirty.
“I'll give you a hand,” Joe said, hair in eyes already, and
Burris couldn't see why he didn't have it cut.
At seven-thirty-four, Mike at the checkout, where he
could take in the money and flirt with the broads at the
same time, Burris got his first customer, a bent old Negro
with a black leather bag.
“Two pounds of neck bones,” he said in a rickety old
voice.
Burris served, then served two more.
Eight-forty-five. Cullen came in, and Burris saw him
immediately. It was like that with him about cops.
Cullen, kind of fat, but kind of handsome in a pudgy


CLARENCE L. COOPER, JR.
way, with a vest that was in style and a sports coat that
was completely off and couldn't hide the bulge of small-
town thirty-eight, came over casually. Burris tensed.
“How ya doin, Burris?” Cullen said in his high voice.
“All right,” Burris said, wiping the blood from his hands.
“Been keeping your nose clean?”
“Like always."
“We have to watch you boys on parole, you know."
“Ask my parole officer, he can tell you."
“Sure, I already did. I just wondered what."
"You wondered what about what?”
“What you know about some things," Cullen said.
“What have you been hearin?”
"About a narcotics ring,” Cullen said. “I hear West-
phalia is a center for Detroit.”
"I never heard anything about it."
Cullen tilted his head back and leaned on the white
freezer counter. His eyes were gray. “I like Westphalia,
Burris, you know what I mean?”
“So do I,” Burris said.
“That's why I like to know if anything criminal is going
on."
"I know you do.”
“And that's why I'd like you to help me, whenever you
hear something wrong is going on in Westphalia." He
winked. “I don't mean like that cathouse that everybody
knows is operatin; that's harmless. A man works hard all
week, he's gotta have something like that. You know what
I mean?”
"Sure, I know what you mean."
“Well,” Cullen tipped his hat down. “I'll be seeing ya.”
"I'll be seein you, Detective Cullen."
He watched the man walk out.
It didn't strike him until after Cullen left. Then he knew
what he should have done. He couldn't understand why he
didn't think of it.
He still wiped his hands of blood, staring out into the
awakening streets. He smiled to himself, remembering


Seven
TWO KIDS WERE DANCING OUTSIDE HIS SHOP, brown little
I moppets, and he knew they should have been home
from school for lunch a long time ago, but he didn't have
the heart to make them go away, when they were so happy.
Grownups paused to watch them dance. -
It was music from the loudspeaker outside they danced
to. One of the new albums, something swinging by Count
Basie.
He came around in front of the counter to watch through
the window. The music was that strong, power-packed
kind of jazz, one that tore through the clouds of inhibitions
in every listening ear and snatched out the common gift of
rhythm.
And these kids exemplified it. The sun was red in wor-
ship, and hot, and their movements became a oneness in
the air that was almost tangible. And how big and dominant
they were becoming! The one of them with short sleeves
and bucked teeth slightly in a child's way, swung around
with the slim fury of a jubilant black god.
Woodwinds blasted out strongly, paving a broad, bam-
booed plain in the introduction of a virile young tenor sax.
Then at the moment they could go no farther, and you had
72


WEED
73
to know that these were happy men making happy music,
there was a pit of brief silence.
The smaller kid fell into this pit, just as though he had
stepped from the wing of a winging jet, and when he
crumpled downward, Ned could barely repress a cry of
horror. But it was all in fun, that's what the band said.
After the first four measures, the tenor convinced him,
and then he saw the kid break, this little kid, like a glider,
and come smoothly, arcingly down, like a little brown bird,
resting on the big wind of the mellow tenor swinging.
And then they met each other, this bucked-toothed kid
and the little one, feet flashing in tempered time, like little
lights in the daytime. This time, Ned did gasp, for it seemed
as though they, infrared in the glow of the sun and the
happy, joyous music, had moved inexorably together, face
to face, and then had seemed to pass right through each
other, as though the music were, for them and everyone
who watched them, a fifth dimension, where all things,
and man especially, were indeed possible.
The street, the day, the air, was all left charged by their
going. It seemed somehow criminal that they had to go,
that the music had to end. It was like seeing something
supernatural and being blessed by it.
Reality was slow in getting back to him. Still enchanted,
he went to the back of the shop and lighted a joint, and
turned the fan on his desk to swinging round, blasting
away the smell of weed.
It was his first joint of the day, the one that always seems
to feel the best. It--the taste of it-made his nose swell
inwardly around the sinuses. The green glow was lavender-
like on his tongue. The inner sides of his jaws began to feel
warm and, as the first flush of highness got through to his
brain, were victims of a triggered flow of new saliva. And
he sucked in on them. The taste of weed now began to
feel thick in his mouth. It burned unevenly as he smoked,
and he knew that it was old stuff, stuff picked a year ago
maybe, part of a pile the grower and his wholesaler prob-
ably had a hard time getting across the border to Texas


WEED
75
N
4
came in the front door. He sniffed, eyes widening in his
small skull under the short brim of his black flat-top,
and he shook his black head at Ned.
“Man, you can almost smell that on the street. You
oughta watch out during business hours," he said.
"I'm careful enough,” Ned said.
Ruckson was sharp today, Ned could see, especially in
his dress. Ned guessed he was going out of the city, a dapper
little black satchel of connections, and destruction too,
when you came right down to it.
Ruckson's two-colored lips of pink and black combined,
pursed like a third orbless eye at Ned.
"I'm rememberin the first time I met you, kid, at
Ernie's."
“That wasn't so long ago," Ned said.
"I dug you to be righteous and a kid who knows a little
somethin,” Ruckson now said in a buzzing voice. “That's
why I made myself known to you."
Ned turned away in growing agitation. “Awright! What
are you gonna do, preach to me?"
"I just don't wanna see you hurt up, kid. It's easy to
get hurt. You know how the game is. You been around. A
small town like this, you'll get your throat cut by bein
careless.” He came over to the counter. “You know what
I mean, Ned.”
“Yeah, I know what you mean."
He laid the piece by Lateef and Byrd onto the plate, and
set the neeedle in the groove. The shop thundered with a
hiatus of young music.
He didn't know why, but Ruckson worried him. Looking
at him now, Ned felt like a man dissected by the tiny
eyes. Only once in a while had he met people like Ruck-
son, those people who, through what it is they are made of
or what it is they think, are able to look into other people,
as though they are soul-searchers for God.
Perhaps the feeling was accentuated by Boo, but Ned
could swear that this was so. He tried to keep Wanda out of
his thoughts and at the same time look Ruckson squarely


76
CLARENCE L. COOPER, JR.
in the face, but this was useless, for his eyes strayed from
Ruckson's eyes and crawled with their gaze along the bony
ridges of upper cheekbone, and a little scar under the
eye that Ned had never noticed before.
"Listen,” he told Ruckson, “I don't have no dough to
day; I can't pay you for the B. You'll have to wait on me.”
“That's okay,” Ruckson said, and his voice approached
croaky proportions: somehow this was a part of him, the
voice changing with everything he said, whole sentences,
and sometimes just words, like an Oriental speaking new-
learned English. “I know you're a right kind of fella, Ned.
One of these days you'll be sittin on top of the world,
and you'll remember old Ruckson. That's all I ask.”
"Sure," Ned said, “I'll hang you up just like a suit, in
mothballs, and I'll take you out some day and think about
you."
“You really touchy today, kid. What's the beef?”
“I don't have any."
"C'mon, don't pull my leg. Who else you got to talk to
outside of me?"
"I just feel kind of drugged today, don't ask me why.
I guess that's all it is."
“What have you been doin for yourself?”
"Same old thing, tryin to make some dough.”
“Shop doin okay?”
"I’u manage,” Ned told him.
Ruckson rubbed his chin, lighted a cigarette, and looked
at Ned. “I just wondered how things were going with you,
since they were goin with me so well. Man, I'm gettin
closer and closer to that pad in San Francisco, right down-
town, with Chinese broads for serving girls."
“You'll get it, man, I know you will.”
Ruckson tilted his head at Ned. “You know one thing,
Ned boy, you're the first guy I ever really liked. I mean
liked. Because I never had no dubs or buddies, real guys
to talk to, and here I am fifty and more—much more.”
Ned laughed and listened to the music.
"Maybe you think this is bull,” Ruckson said, "but it's


WEED
77
Tuinrunus
the truth, Ned. You're ... man, I don't know how to de-
scribe you. You're like me being friends with a nice guy
who is dead.”
“Dead?”
"No, no, man, you don't get me. Yeah, you're dead,
but not dead. Do you get me?”,
“Hell no,” Ned said.
Ruckson spread his long fingers. “Ned, you're like a
painting. Like somethin done a long time ago, like in Paris,
where I did some time after the first War. Or like in a cave
I seen there in France.”
"A cave? Ruck, you're makin so much noise I can't
hear the music.”
"C'est la vive,” Ruckson said in a high, piquant French
voice that made his black stature seem foreign, other-
worldly.
“Don't give me that,” Ned said. "Just give me one good
reason why you're here."
"To see the beauty of you, boy,” Ruckson grinned, “and
to ease your jeans a bit.” .
“How?"
“Don't tell me you don't need some money?"
“Sure, I need some money. Where's it comin from?
Are you gonna loan me, say twenty, for a couple weeks?
Or fifty would be better." Ned was laughing now.
Ruckson turned around in a quick half circle. "You
don't believe me, I can see. Take it easy, Ned,” he said in
parting.
. “Hey, wait a minute," Ned called out. “Let me hear
some more of this.”
"You really interested?”
"If you're not kiddin, you know goddamn well I am.
I could use some bread right now.”
"I thought you might be able to.” Ruckson came back
over and stood in front of him, and his eyes watched Ned
for a long time, looking into him with an X-ray force;
made Ned listen for the close of the Lateef-Byrd piece.
“Somethin's worryin ya,” Ruckson said, looking close.


78
CLARENCE L. COOPER, JR.
"No," Ned told him, surprised that Ruckson said what
he was thinking, “nothing's bothering me."
"Is it Doris?”
Ned almost raised his voice. "No, it's not Doris. I told
you it wasn't anything."
Ruckson's voice changed to a deep basso. “It must be
Wanda, then.”
The record ended. Ned put on some Stan Kenton.
"I've got a picture of Doris,” Ruckson said.
“You always got pictures of people. They don't mean
anything."
“No, listen, give this a hearing. Doris is an oyster who's
growin into a clam and you're a pearl diver. One day you
steal that little bit of grit of a marble from her, and there's
nothing she can do about it. But she gets another grit, and
starts to makin of it, and she starts to grow at the same
time, until she's round and big, big as an airplane tire."
“I don't want to hear it,” Ned told him.
“Of course you don't.”
“What happens then?" Like all of Ruckson's "pictures,"
Ned couldn't wait to see the last of it.
"After she gets big as an airplane tire?”
“Yeah, that big."
Ruckson closed his tiny eyes and pursed his lips again.
"She goes crunch on your leg when you come back to steal
that other grit; she's waitin on you, and her big mouth goes
crunch on your leg so you can't get away. She holds you
there while yer runnin out of breath.”
“I don't know how to swim."
“That's okay, it doesn't make no difference,” Ruckson
grinned. “I just wanted you to see that picture I had.”
“You were talkin about money," Ned reminded him.
"I wasn't kiddin. You can pick up three hundred Thurs-
day night, if you feel like you can.”
Ned saw three hundred-dollar bills in his mind. “That
much? What would I have to do?"
Ruckson waited, then said, “Make my run for me, to
Detroit.”
.
:
.-


WEED
“Why can't you make it?”
“The local fuzz is watchin me, for some reason.”
"How much is goin?”
“Six pounds-fifty bucks for each one, Mexicali Green
—and a can for yourself when you get back here.”
Ned waited, thinking, and the loud brass clashed against
him from the turntable, making it difficult for him to ex-
amine all the angles.
But this much he did know, and that was Wanda, and
the things she had said to him, and the violation of his
lover's body which had until now seemed of little impor-
tance, that he had to end some way.
Why this intense thinking like a square, he didn't know.
Wanda had been doing it for most of her life, and it was
a certainty that no one could take anything from her now.
Yet just thinking of her there beneath some man's body
in her green-lit room was enough to make the world turn,
or simply stop altogether.
He jerked at the touch of Ruckson's eyes on him, as
though the little man were reading his mind. No, he wasn't
able to see it. This new thing in Ned Land, this questing
pain unsatisfied that he had to sate. No one else but Wanda
knew it, and he was sure that she knew it.
It was like a dream come suddenly true. All the while
he had had Wanda, he had never had her at all: and now
he had her in truth. It was too much for any one man, and
he wished that he were two, so that he could really feel
the joy that needed two of him to express itself.
"What time Thursday?” he said.
"You could catch the 10:20 P.M. to Detroit. I could see
you a little while before and give you what you need to
have.”
“When would I get the three hundred?”
“When you get back here. I'll take care of tickets and
everything."
“Where would I meet you?”
"At Pancho's place. If me and him ain't there, Velma'll
take care of you.”


80
CLARENCE L. COOPER, JR.
o
"
"Can I have some time to think it over?”
“Sure, but today is Tuesday. You'll have to think fast,
kid. I gotta know by Thursday mornin."
"I'll let you know by then."
Ruckson turned to go. “Don't worry; it's all safe. You
know I know, man: look how close I am to that spot in
Frisco. Chinese girls and a waterpipe full of weed. Think
it over, Ned. The only thing, sometimes a man thinks
himself out of safety, you know what I mean? He gets a
big break, a chance to do somethin for himself, and he
thinks himself out of it. This is a chance for you, kid.”
"I'll think it over,” Ned told him.
“How are ya fixed for weed?” Ruckson grinned at him.
“I'm okay till tomorrow.”
The little man took a little packet from his coat pocket,
cellophane, and Ned could see the reefer within. “Pay me
later-or better, take this on account.”
“I still haven't decided yet,” Ned warned him.
"S'okay. I won't lose nothin. Well, I'll see you later, kid.
I'm on my way downtown to price one of Caddy's El-
dorados."
"I personally go for Thunderbird this year."
Ruckson guffawed. “May the Lord give it to ya! So
long, Ned.”
"Bye, Ruck."
And it was just possible that Ruckson wasn't lying, that
he was on his way downtown to buy a Cadillac. You could
never tell about a guy like that. Why else was he so sharp?
Ned put the reefer in his pants pocket, exulting at the
feel of it and what might be possible because of it.
Just as he was turning around, Doris came in the-shop.
Her face was blanched and a little frightful.
"Hello, Ned.”
He waited, half turning to her.
“Just thought I'd stop by,” she said.
“Well, how are ya?”
“I'm okay."
“How's the kid?”


WEED
8/
She smiled a little. “He's okay. He's the reason I came
over.”
"What is it? Are you goin back to Detroit?”
"No, not yet,” she let him know. "I planned to stay for
a while. Until after Thursday, at least."
"What happens Thursday?”
“It's the kid's birthday,” she said.
"Eight years old, then! Doris, I didn't realize how long
it had been.”
“Yeah, it's been eight years,” she said.
"Eight years," Ned echoed.
“I was just thinkin, Ned...” Her eyes were high brown
this morning, and she wore a brown, cut-mourning suit.
“I thought I'd come over and ask you."
“Ask me what?"
"If you'd come to David's birthday party."
Ned turned away. “The kid should be at school instead
of some goddamned birthday party.”.
"Well, we're goin right back this week.”
"He should still be in school; you shouldn't have brought
him up here."
She came around him, where her eyes could see his face,
her slim, dim body over the counter, like Ruckson almost,
and he almost said, Ruckson, why the hell don't you get
away from here?
“Ned, will you come?” she said.
“Thursday?” he said.
“Thursday,” she replied.
He was aware that it was all like a conspiracy: Ruckson
with his Gangster and Doris with the kid's birthday, and
he remembered Wanda at the same time.
“I don't think I can make it,” he said.
“It'll be the last time for a while.” Her eyes pleaded
at him. “I can't come up here for a while, I won't be able
to afford it.”
“That'll be just fine," Ned said.
“... You don't know how happy I would be if you could
come, Ned. You don't know.”


Gight
e, but dying aed her mouth, sticking to heldn't
CHE BEGAN TO DIE WHEN THE LIGHTS CAME ON. Not
really die, but dying anyway with that perpetual feeling
of living death. She opened her mouth, lying there on the
bed. The air was breathless and hot, sticking to her.
Lorraine came and knocked on the door, but she didn't
answer.
"Wanda?” Lorraine said through the door.
She closed her mouth.
“Wanda?”
Another knock, then walking footsteps away and down
the hall, and Wanda knew where she was going now.
The lights were from the outside, and green, like the
one she now switched on in her room. Tuesday nights were
easy. Usually they were, but it didn't seem to begin so easy
this evening.
She came to the window and stared out on the street.
As she looked across to Ned's shop, she had an almost
overpowering desire for sexual intercourse. She had utterly
no idea where it came from, and it wasn't a thing her mind
was partial to at the moment. Still, the tingle was there,
a little capsulated now by her thoughts, and she tried to
defy the odd sensations.
She felt herself in a slip without any panties, and as she
84


WEED
87
If Ned would only lift his head, he'd see how wrong it
was, and then he could make it all impossible. Why had
she acted the way she did? It seemed so irrevocable, so
irresistibly did she yield to the thing she felt, like that
feeling she had a moment ago which impelled her to copu-
late immediately.
She stood in front of her bed and lit a cigarette from
her dressing table. The room began to close in on her, and
she almost didn't know it at first. When it saw she was
noticing, it stopped the moving inward.
She went back to the mirror and sat in front of it. She
watched herself smoking the cigarette. And she thought
of Danny.
Danny had been her mother's lover, fifteen years ago
and more, in a place something like this although they
all seemed to be like this place, even since she was a little
girl and found out quite early that men stuck it in women.
Danny had been her mother's lover, she thought again,
and perhaps if he hadn't been, she'd be something else
right now, maybe even a woman with a husband and
children.
Danny was her mother's lover, and sometimes she
watched them loving—so professionally they did it and
she knew that Danny knew she was watching through the
upstairs doors: when, knowing this, he became more ar-
dent. Then it all became freakish, and her mother and
Danny became freakish, their bodies, black and yellow,
became a wet, cushy merging-in together that produced
wild animal cries of passion and the fetid stink of bodies
mating, squashed together, monstrously something other
than what they were.
Sometimes they clashed, Mama and Danny, because
she was too old for one thing, and she was becoming im-
potent for another, and Danny lusted after flesh-that was
the other. Flesh that he could taste and know with his
tongue, flesh that followed after him through the maze of
countless animal delights he could devise.
She wondered, afterward, whether there had been other


WEED
89
pened. She could remember little of it, why she had to be
like this right now. Slave of sale, slave of Mama, and now
this new slavery to Ned Land—the worst kind.
She remembered the outline on the floor.
Mama said he was sick. That she took him to a hospital.
They would take care of him and he would be all right in
a while. But he wasn't coming back there, that sonofabitch.
That dirty black bastard. That jelly-roller.
And her, Wanda, she was getting it right up the ass, like
what Danny did. And she was going to hoe it. She was
going to hump it. She owed it, and she was going to give it.
She would never be free now if she ever had before.
Nobody ever saw him again.
And sometimes now, she caught that great black face
watching her, as though it suspected that she knew what
had actually happened after all, and as though it expected
her to tell someone soon—and the fear that it would not
be there to stop her.
Mama would never forget, and neither would Wanda.
She used to count the men at first, but then she got tired
after ninety-something, and it had only taken a little while
to get that far. They had a place in Brooklyn once, the
time she thought she might get away with a fella whose
name she couldn't even remember now—a fella something
like Ned, but not like Ned, not what she felt for him. That
time she hadn't cared, and she was full up and sick of a
lot of old men-she was only using the fella. And Mama
knew it all the time, but she didn't say a damned thing,
not before or after. She was on an Ellington kick then, and
all you could hear was “Take The A Train" all the time.
Mama dared her and won out.
When the guy came to see her again, Lorraine told him
Wanda didn't work there anymore, and she made the guy
pay ten dollars for a lay so bad he never came back again.
That was when Denise decided to stay on in New York,
when they thought of Pennsylvania for a while. Denise
hated her, Wanda, for no reason at all, it seemed. She had
promised Wanda when they were children, “I'U kill you
3
113222T
when they wanda, foren they were


90
CLARENCE L. COOPER, JR.
.
some day. Black bitch,” she could call her, for Denise was
lighter, with raw bones like a hunky, “I'll kill you some
day."
She could never understand about Denise. For no reason,
she had wanted passionately to see her, Wanda, dead.
From childhood, almost, since Denise was only a year
older than her—she could remember their coming up to-
gether. Always, when she got a chance, she would hurt
Wanda physically. Or maybe they all hurt her, she thought,
going back over it. All her sisters.
But Denise more than the others, that she was sure of.
Denise would jab her with a pin, just to see the blood run.
No one else did that, not even Lorraine, who hated her
too~not to see her blood that way and be glad because
they were seeing it, the way Denise was glad.
It was so unreal, being a whore with sisters who were
whores. Mama and all the others were dream figures->yes,
even the men who would come tonight. It was a realization
that she never had before, and it was caused by Ned Land,
the painful reality of him. There had been reality in Danny,
voluptuous, sucking, stinging reality—but nothing like this,
this feeling of pure woman-breath that enveloped her and
made her want for the warmth, the strength, the muskiness
of a man's arms.
No, she could not bare this this yearning for relief.
She had to be satisfied, and in so many things she'd never
even considered. But she could not afford the risk. Not
for hershe wasn't thinking about herself. But Ned, most
of all. She felt guilty in taking this thing from him.
He was twenty-seven.
Wanda began to brush her hair. It was that thick, curly
sort of stuff, black, with new grease, soft and warm, alive
with depthness, slivering over her fingertips. She let her
fingers stroke it and pile it, until it hovered over her face
like a great black cloud, catching glimmers of the green
light that looked like flashing lightning just beginning, in
the mirror.
In a few years she would begin to sag. It wouldn't be
9


92
CLARENCE L. COOPER, JR.
mag
tasted a tobacco chip in her mouth, and she blew it out
with a quick neat sputter. She found her pack and lighted
another one.
The promises she made to him, and he to her: too much
was all they said and couldn't fulfill.
But didn't she deserve a chance, despite all else? Even
if it meant Ned would destroy himself because of her,
sooner or later? She wouldn't have to love him at all, to
do that. She was caught, and she couldn't turn or cry out,
snagged inexorably. She did love him, she knew that if
she could call this thing love: this tearing away at her
insides as though she were a jungle animal being disem-
boweled by other jungle animals. Still alive while they were
doing it. That's the way she felt.
She felt painted on a wall, like murals she had seen in
some of the fine houses she had been within, with some
of the many fine men who had done so many unfine, un-
manly things to her—just something on the landscape that
is alive but the artist and the viewer don't know. Just the
pain of pain was unbearable.
That's what it was: her being torn away from it all by
Ned Land, and him not caring how much he hurt her in
his tearing: her screaming with the pleasure of it all the
while.
Mama turned up the volume from the outside, and the
music came uninvited into her room, filtering through her
with jazzy obnoxiousness.
She caught herself waiting and praying. She called her-
self the most nasty thing she could think of, but she was
glad that the name was probably the sort of woman she
was. That sort of a girl with Danny. A piece of murder.
A stain of blood on the rug somewhere.
How could she justify herself to Ned?
Thirty-four.
She twisted around, the cheek of her palm coming
against her hip, trying to reassure her. She was flesh, and
warm, flowing blood from a hurt wound. She had a right


94
CLARENCE L. COOPER, JR.
Ned's place was still open. Eight-thirty, and the night
becoming blacker.
Where was she going from here? She had to make up
her mind to that, sooner or later. With Ned?—thirty-four,
and with Ned? It was a bet with the odds against her. She
could make him love her, if he didn't already. She knew
how to treat him, she knew how to touch that tender, re-
sponding thing in him: she could find it writhing like a
little nerve end and fondle it and squeeze it until he knew
that he was a man and nothing else. That she could do,
and this much nature and life had given her an ability to do.
But when she began to change and he saw it, when he
became used to her and knew the days on which her men-
strual cycle would begin and end—with that familiarity,
and the passing of years—what could she do to keep from
dying?
Especially when the cycle stopped?
These things she would never know. This was her
gamble. This was her chance to do something right for a
change, and not worry what Mama had done that night.
The knock sounded. She knew she could put it off no
longer.
She went over and opened the door. Lorraine stood
there, her face freshly painted.
“Ned's here,” she said.
“Thanks,” Wanda said, but Lorraine didn't go away.
“I'd sure like to know what it is you do to Ned,” Lor-
raine said in a soft voice.
She came past Lorraine into the hall.
She was becoming more and more afraid of Lorraine.
She walked quickly to the livingroom. The stereo blasted
out mad, inventive music.
The first thing she saw was the big, black, grinning face
of her mother.
And then she saw Ned.
R
.


Nine
11 W
AVID SHIFTED ON THE KITCHEN COUCH. He had on
U new shoes his mother had bought. His hair was.
combed and his mouth was clean. His eyes were bright
and targetlike. He shifted again and scratched his leg. He
watched his mother moving about the apartment. She set
a dish down on the table, too close to the edge and almost
where his birthday cake was.
Behind David's eyes, a thing began to work, a beautiful,
childish thing of pleasure to come, of experimentation and
spite at the same time, with a kidlike knowledge that two
and two were four even if it didn't seem like they were.
It circulated all about in him, like ring around the rosy,
and it didn't feel bad, because it wasn't bad to him, not
doing what he planned to do: he was what every child is,
a careless motion, a comic action that reiterates itself be-
cause it is being forced through the groove of the thing
that made it.
"David!” Doris shouted at him, but it was too late.
It was like vanilla flavor, the way he did it, creeping
over to the table like that, on tiptoes so she wouldn't hear
him, and, this way, on tiptoes, reaching out toward the
table edge with his little fingers pointing, then, with a quick
snip of his forefinger, flicking out against that dish set too
95


98
CLARENCE L. COOPER, JR.
She said, “David, come here."
He screaked his teeth at her.
“David, I won't hurt you, baby."
He screaked again.
"Come here, David. I'm going to tell your father.”
“He's not my father.” Another screak.
"David, don't do that. You know it makes mother's skin
crawl."
"I didn't mean to knock the old plate off,” he said. “I
apologized for it. I said it was an accident.”
“Sure, it was an accident, baby.”
"You just wanna spank me,” he said.
“No, I don't, David. I just want you to come here to
mother and stop doing your teeth like that.”
“I haven't got any birthday presents."
"Mother's got you some nice presents. Just come here,
David.”
He made his teeth cry.
“You don't care anything about me," he said. “Nobody
but Grandmommie and Granddaddy do. That's who. That's
why I know."
He screaked his teeth.
"You said a nasty word,” he said. “You said ass."
“Come here to mother, David.”
"You said you would beat my little ass. You got to
*promise you won't.”
“I promise," Doris said.
"I don't believe you; you tell stories.”
“I'm not tellin a story this time, baby."
“If you do spank me,” David said, "I hope you die.”
“Don't say things like that, David.”
“I wanna go home.”
"We're goin home, David. Come on out, now. C'mon,
Dave baby.” He wouldn't. “All right then.” She went back
into the kitchen.
He lay his face against the furnished table top. It felt
cool to his cheek. He stretched his hands out, palms down,
and they felt cool, too. It felt like the sun had suddenly
whyre scream a nasty ther, Dar my lit


100
CLARENCE L. COOPER, JR.
chicken and other stuff in. I guess we'll have to start with.
out your father.”
She went into the kitchen.
He watched her bending to look into the oven. Her dress
came up a lot. He saw a lot of her. In the front she was
nice, with her little breasts—but she wasn't in the back.
It was like she wasn't being good. He thought about Jesus
on the cross, being good.
His grandmother took him to a sanctified church, and
grandfather went there too. They jumped around and sang.
They ran all over. They were happy because of God. The
trumpet said it, the guitar said it, the piano said it, the
drums too.
“Grandmommie says we should love Jesus,” he said to
his mother bending to look into the oven.
"Yeah, but Jesus don't love us,” Doris said wearily.
"Grandmommie said you gotta love Him."
He knew his mother was getting mad again.
“I don't give a damn what your Grandmommie says,
David.” She came back in. She grabbed him before he
could get away. “Now, I've got you! I'm gonna beat your
ass, David.”
He struggled, but she held him, coming around to where
he was, and too late he saw the ironing cord she had de-
tached from the iron on the board in the kitchen.
“You tell Jesus to keep you from getting your ass
whipped good right now!” Doris said. “You're too much
for me, David. Of all the days I have to pick to show you
I'm your mother and you're going to do what I say, it has
to be on your birthday. But, David, this is just right!”
She came down with the cord, and the electric pain coursed
through his thigh and nice new suit. “Can Jesus save you
now?” Again, too hard this time, he felt the pain explode
within his little flesh. “Jesus never gave me what I wanted!”
He began to scream; wildly, he lashed his arms and began
to punch at her belly. But the cord never stopped, and
he began to get frightened with the continuing pain. "Your
Grandmommie's not your mother, David—I am! If I have


104
CLARENCE L. COOPER, JR.
call me anything like that again, David, I'm gonna try to
beat your living brains out!”
"Your boyfriend said somethin worse; I heard him say
it myself. If he can say it, why can't I?”
“When did you hear Jack say anything like that?”
"At Grandmommie's house,” he blahhed at her. “Grand-,
mommie and Granddaddy were gone to the show and you
thought I was 'sleep, but I heard him ask you why didn't
you give him some before they came back.” .
She stood up from the table like something had sprung
her up, like a Jack-in-a-ball that he used to call Jack like
her boyfriend, that Grandmommie bought for him one
time. “You!" she shouted at him.
He moved out of her reach. “And I watched you while
you did it, too!"
He made his eyes crosseyed and screaked his teeth at
the same time. She became four zig-zaggy people in his
sight. The music from the outside swelled around them
again. He dragged his plate away from hers and took a
potato chip with crosseyes, which was quite a feat, since
there were so many of them to choose from.
His mother couldn't say anything, he knew, because he
knew she knew he was right, and had heard Jack say that,
then she probably remembered that if he had saw that, he
saw what she had to do with that man, with her legs all
split open and like a bear's face deep within, and he even
saw pink colors, which had terrified him the most.
But what he saw then: he knew she didn't want to be
thinking that he saw the way they did it, almost like two
dogs he had seen do it before, but not from the front like
that, the dogs, which made them have to look into each
other's face like that, and see the ugliness of each other's
face. It didn't seem possible, the way they did it, and, as
David had watched, only the movements of the half naked
bodies meant anything. They had stopped almost right
away after they started. David had wondered why any-
thing so important to the two of them should end so
quickly: it should go on for a long time, he had thought.


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105
And that's what doing it was, and this time he wasn't
telling a story, for he knew what it was his mother had
that Jack had wanted. And even the man, his father,
wanted. That's why he didn't want him to come, to take
what she had to give again. That's why he was screaking
his teeth now and looking crosseyed and munching a potato
chip all at the same time.
His mother couldn't say anything.
The music got louder, someone's fingers turning it up.
A knock sounded on the door, and Doris jerked her
head. She went quickly past him to the door. He had to
uncross his eyes now to turn and look. He still ate potato
chips. He saw the door open and the man standing there,
the black man, him, blacker than David, with something in
a package under his arm. He looked funny with an open
white shirt and the top half of a suit. David didn't like him.
He didn't like the way his eyes looked at him, sometimes
all blank and guilty-like and red-flecked white in his black
face. He didn't like his mouth that opened, like David's
own, showing two big teeth, and the way the mouth always
looked as though it were going to say something. He didn't
like it. He didn't like it because this was his father, because
he had to be his father coming here this way, even though
David didn't want him to be—and there was a something
like jealousy in his big eyes as he watched the look on his
mother's face and knew then how important she was.
His father came into the room, smiling uncertainly at
him. “Hi, kid.”
David didn't say anything. His mother was taking the
package and his coat from his father. His father couldn't
watch David all the time, and neither could his mother.
He pushed an arm against the birthday cake, which sat too
close to the edge anyway. It went over, flipping once, then
plopped, candles and all, in pulpy destruction on the floor,
and he felt some of it gush against his new pants leg.
He looked up at them and their not-understanding faces.
“It was an accident,” he said.


Ten
M HE NIGHT HAD TURNED BLACKER than the inside of
1 Ned Land's soul. He tried to walk faster, shamed with
an unidentifiable demand on himself, impaled on two
prongs of his own making. People were beginning to crowd
the street, there were lights at the farthest end, but he paid
no attention to this.
Too late he had seen the look on Doris' face when he
had to go, when she saw that it was really no use and
that look had frightened him. s
A cloud of black began to form in the outer sky. Little
green, gray, red, silver lights of the little city worried him
as he walked fast down the street.
Music from the Three-Penny Opera came to his ears.
Then ahead of him he saw the man with the monkey and
the box he wound. He was arguing with another old man
as Ned approached. They looked Spanish, but the language
they spoke, interwined with familiar but distorted bits of
English, was not.
"I'ma tellin you,” they said, and Ned watched their
fingers waving in the air.
"Mysa nah,” said one, the one without the box, “my
dog, he eat you little man up!”
"No dogga, any! Pietro kill all; he kill all he meet!”
106


WEED
107
"Hah!” the other said. "We bet!”
“Bet! Bet!”
“Bet!”
Better than living and doing nothing, Ned thought, better
than anything else. Better, as he walked ahead, thinking
of what he had to do.
He passed the park and lighted a joint. He had finished
it, and made a roach in a cigarette, before he got to the
other end. He met a patrolman, swinging his stick, doing
tricks to amuse himself. Ned went on through the night,
to where he had to go, with not much time left.
The walls of the buildings grouped up against him. He
squeezed his way between them, and sometimes they had
begun to close on him before he got fully through the little
spaces. The weed was doing this, making, everything seem
smaller than it was.
He was almost crushed by a laundry truck, with two
grinning eyes in the night.
The buildings rushed by him.
His feet touched the other side of the street, and he
looked up at the sign. He hesitated, coming down from the
other side of the street. Across from the Brazilian's apart-
ment.
He felt funny here every time he came, and the only
other times he had come, two, were with Ruckson. His
foot touched the curb edge.
It was Velma more than anything else. That way she
looked at him. That way she stood sometimes. That way
she raised her eyes and mocked him. And it was the white-
ness of her and the foreignness, that was the other thing.
And him trying to deny he wanted her.
Until Wanda, women had tired him out, dragged him
down, sucked his blood; they were sucking orifices with
lower and higher degrees of inner warmth. If he began an
act with one, she usually ended it. Yes, this was the way
it should be. Until Wanda.
Ned stood outside and sucked on another joint, since
no one was coming. He was beginning to get afraid. If it


WEED
109
He raised his fist and let the knuckles fall twice. It took
a year for the door to open. A night-latch chain divided
her face: Ned could see the upper hazel of eyes and a
careless, all-night bush of black above the white forehead.
Below, there was no mouth; it was in shadow. But a pip
of light shone on her nose, smooth, like alabaster. The
upper part of her bosom through the door watched him
with a straight-up smile; it told of Velma's heaviness.
He nodded his head.
The door opened, and he came in behind Velma in a
spangled black thing, off the shoulders, that made her look
too wide on small legs and stilted heels.
"C'mon in and have a seat,” she said, ahead of him.
He closed the door. “Ruckson—" he started.
"He ain't here. He won't be back soon. He told me to
tell you he'd see you after you got back.” She turned and
smiled at him, and this time he could see her full red,
laughing-at-him mouth. "I'll take care of you, Ned.”
He didn't know how to feel, and reefer, at that second,
didn't let him. He began to see things that weren't there.
He saw her smile at him in an inviting way that couldn't be.
He saw her eyes lower, almost a wink—and that gesture
she made toward the bottom part of him.
Ned knew he was higher than he should be. He sat in a
little sitting room, just by the door, with web-footed Chilean
rugs, while she went away. There was a big couch, and
a console phono in the corner, from where the maracas
and Cuban bongos swung out in slamming tempo.
He relaxed on the sea of the driving drums and imagined
Africa for a moment, those thumping jungle sounds that,
underneath the skin and blood, pulsed toward the heart
and drove the body into black pits of horrors and the
freedom of excruciating delights. He listened to the drums.
The drums drove on. They spoke of John, a nameless jungle
man, they spoke of John and his woman; they spoke of
John and his children; they spoke of John and his dying;
they spoke of John again, created in his own image.


110
CLARENCE L. COOPER, JR.
The drums rolled and lubbed at him; they punched his
flesh like fists.
The drums said Ned, Ned Land. Ned Ned Land Ned.
Ned Land said no, because the power was too much all at
once, and it was a thing that made him ashamed again,
this heathen drumming, that aroused his own jungleness
and pulled at the fiber of his body; pushed, crushed, against
him, because Pot had served to make him aware of this
kinship instantly, made him know that he was not removed,
however much he thought he was. That this was the source
of him, like an exposed nerve.
The drums, beat, thudded, bombed away at him.
Velma came in like a white sacrifice. She held the pack-
age in her right hand, held it out to him, a virginlike ges-
ture that made Ned look her all over. The raciality of them
was accented by the drums beating, accusing him, cajoling
him into a sort of vengeance.
He had never had a white woman before. Of all the
women he had had. Not Her. Not Her of the white and
lusty thigh, of pink-tipped tit-not Her of What Every
Woman Should Be.
He had known men who had, but not him.
He took the package, rising toward her.
“Wanna drink?" she said.
Ned looked at his watch. “I've gotta be goin in a little
while.”
“Ah, hell, don't be in such a rush,” Velma said. "Have i
a drink.”
"Okay,” Ned said.
She went back out. Her butt was almost flat, but it
bounced beneath, where he could almost feel his hands
were. She turned at the doorway and looked at him as she
went out.
Ned listened to the drums. It was as though they could
help him know what to do; they gave him a strange sort
of strength; they jogged him with their power.
Velma came back in with the drinks, with a drink for


WEED
herself, and she was wiggling this time, barefoot, jiggling
to the music as she came toward him.
"Here you go, honey,” she said, and handed him the
drink.
Ned sipped and watched her spread up above him.
“You like that music?” she said. “It's Pancho's. Doesn't
it do somethin to ya?”
"Have you ever been in Brazil?” Ned asked.
She closed her eyes dreamily above her luscious lips.
“Brazil is nice, ya know, Ned? I like it. I dig it. Every-
body's happy there. Sometimes I wonder why I'm here,
ya know? when everybody's so happy there? It's a puzzle."
"It's probably money," Ned answered for her. “A lot
of it.”
"Pancho's got enough already,” she said in a lamenting
voice. “He ought to get out.”
A drumming thump brought blood to his ears, as though
he had suddenly been struck with a folded fist. It even
made him reel, then right himself, because he had to, to
listen at it again—and again it struck his brain hard.
Velma danced barefoot.
“C'mon, Ned honey.” She stretched out a hand to him.
“Dance with me."
Ned rose, illogically thinking how hateful the kid was,
and went to her. But the way he went to her was not the
way she had invited him, and Ned came to her a man
aroused. And when she saw this, she laughed. He didn't
know whether it was a laugh of derision or amusement.
Whatever it was, she came against him and that part of
him. With a thing like fear, he moved away from her. He
knew how weak he was with the movement.
“Get that sirupyness,” she said, her eyes looking up at
his mouth, her warm, fat flesh in his hands. “It's like sirup,
so smooth. My old man had a sirup farm in Canada, with
big trees, Ned. Aw c'mon, Ned—dance. It's easy."
Ned tried to dance with her.
“I like to dance with Negroes,” she said. “They're not


112
CLARENCE L. COOPER, JR.
like white, or even Pancho, the way he dances. It's like
dancing with an animal.”
Ned tensed against her.
“I don't mean like you think,” she said. "It's another
kind of being free. That's the way it is.”
She wiggled against him with the drums.
Don't, Ned almost said. But it was too late to stop her,
and she began to explain what she was trying to say with
her body. Her body said that they were two people listening
to the father of Ned Land, and she was a white woman
who had no business being this close to him because she
was white.
Ned didn't know what made him frightened. He wasn't
afraid of Pancho, that big-small man, and he didn't care
what Ruckson would say, with his talk of "the game," or
what life ought to be.
The father of Ned Land said, Harken to woman. Listen
to the drums crying, listen to the tale they tell of a thing
that has happened a million times before, listen to the
silver and gold of living.
"Pancho had a farm,” she said, in time with the drums.
"He used it to grow Pot; that's how I met him: through a
Chicago connection. He used to smoke his good green Pot
and make a couple of guitar boys and a little drummer kid
play for him on the front porch.”.
"I bet it was hot,” Ned said against her, his voice rising
with the words.
"It was hot as hell,” she said. “But it was living, Ned
baby, you believe it. That's where I'd like to live all my
life.” .
Her eyelids seemed purpled yet flame-flecked. Ned's
bold arm pulled her toward him, and she didn't try to stop
him. She looked up at him, while the phono began to shriek.
“Want a joint?” she said.
"I'm already high."
"Have another.”
She came away from him and went into the other room.
Ned remained to weave with the compulsive sounds of the


120
CLARENCE L. COOPER, JR.
the windows, the upper sections of which were antique
stained glass, so popular in construction during the turn
of the century.
The steps cascaded down crookedly on either side. He
went carefully up the ones to his left and knocked hard on
the thick plate glass of the front door. For a long time
nothing happened, but when he knocked again a light-
clicked on at the landing and, through the faded muslin
curtains, he could see a heavy-set woman start a torturous
journey downward.
"Yeah?” she said in a harsh frog's voice, opening the
door.
“I'm here for Ruckson,” he said.
“Why didn't he come for hisself?”
“He said you'd know why if he couldn't make it this
time."
She stood for a moment longer, looking him over, then
she swung the door open for him to enter. “You got some
money for me?”
“As soon as I take care of Ruckson's business,” Ned
told her.
He followed her up the long steep stairs to the top,
where they entered a large diningroom, furnished hap-
hazardly, it seemed, with discarded relics of past opulence,
and a large dining table, where two women sat, one, the
eldest, with her head on the butt of a palm, nodding, and
the other anxiously intent on his face as he entered.
"Did you see the whore car when you come in?" she
asked him.
"I didn't see any cars," he said.
She licked her mouth. “It's gettin so, everytime you catch
a trick, you have to run five miles after you get the lay
over. The goddamn police. The bastard police.”
Now Ned turned to the larger woman, a yellowish, star-
ing rock with blue around the portholes of her wide,
vein-scarred eyes. Her mouth was thin and whitey-like, he
thought, and there was too much jaw on either side of her
face.


WEED
121
PAD
“Gimme the cop money and sit down here at the table,"
she told him in the same harsh voice.
Ned did as he was told. The big woman went to the
rear of the house. He looked at the two women. The one
who nodded had not yet opened her eyes, and he figured
she had just copped a blow somewhere and could not
help nodding under the powerful press of heroin.
The other woman turned on him, actually incorporating
him in her problem. “You gotta see how it is. Do you
see? How can I turn a trick with the goddamn whore car
runnin up and down all the alleys? But do you think Larue
will care about that?”
She licked her mouth again and crossed her knees, sud-
denly noticing the abrased, dirty tops of them. “Look at
this . . . goddamn ... goddamn! Do you know how I did
this? Please, look, do you know how I did this? Runnin-
running from the goddamn whore car!” He saw a vapor
at the corner of her eye as she whirled on him. “You know
how much money I made tonight? Nine dollars for three
fuggin tricks! But what can I tell Larue? I been busted
twice already for accostin and the next time I fall I'll have
to do a bit but I can't tell him that. What am I supposed
to do?”
Then Ned, still one in a realm of tricks, looked about
the place and saw it was a trickhouse, where the whores
brought their customers. The front room was dimly lit,
but there was a rumpled one-sheeted bed there behind a
pair of dirty curtains. The rest of the place, a hall he could
see, housed doors and, he knew, many other beds like the
one in front.
"It's like this,” the whore said, and for the first time he
saw that her face was smooth and almost bright under
the garish makeup, like someone's little sister playing at
being a woman—but the eyes: they sent a thrill through
him, for he became a part of their pleading with a certain
knowledge. “I've had Larue for five years. And I been
good to him. He's drivin a Caddy, and there ain't many
whores can say that like that junkie bitch there. All she's


122
CLARENCE L. COOPER, JR.
got is a ten-year itch from usin stuff all day. But I been
good to my Daddy, you know, baby? Three hundred a
week ain't nothin for me to lay on him. That's why I
wanna know why he don't understand. Oh, goddamn ..."
She became intent on her stockings again.
“Do you know what I mean?" she asked Ned pleadingly.
He nodded.
“Five years, and it ain't ever been like this, not this
kind of pressure on me, the kind of pressure he's puttin
on me, and I never bitch with him about the other broads
in the stable, because I know there's not one can touch
me, and Larue knows it, too. So that's why I don't under-
stand.”.
The whore who nodded seemed to laugh in her sleep.
“What are you laughin at?" said the little sister whore,
but the other did not reply, silent and still with head on
hand.
"That goddamn junkie bitch is out of her mind,” the
other said viciously. But not vicious, really, in a vicious
way—more a spontaneous self-evaluation. “I try to do my
part, you know, baby? Do you know Ted or Nero? I mean,
those pimps don't even touch Larue—it wasn't the stable
put him on his feet that way, it was me. Do you under-
stand? Baby, I been kickin mud for five years, I mean really
kickin it, and it seems like he should have a little consider-
ation for me!" She began to pout again at the ripped knees
of her stockings.
Then, as Ned watched, her face softened and he knew
her thoughts were lost to the reality of the moment.
"I know I won't have to suffer much longer. Larue said
so. He said, right after I build this last grand. To the
coast. I never been out of this fuggin city, you know that?
I feel like I been cooped up all my life with nothin but
tricks and next month's car note. But it's gonna be dif-
ferent. I deserve somethin, don't I?”
He watched her face return to normal, feeling a small
chill as he witnessed the relapse.


124
CLARENCE L. COOPER, JR.
“You know why you're the biggest trick?” said the nod-
ding woman. “ 'Cause what you're buying don't even exist.
At least the trick gets somethin for his money, but you,
you whore, you don't get nothin but a promise from some
bastard who only wants to work the livin shit outt ya."
"You shut up, you hear me?"
“ 'Cause what?—'cause I'm a junkie?”
“Yeah, 'cause you're a junkie, that's what, and you
couldn't pimp a man if he was blind in both eyes and deaf
and dumb besides.”
The other woman laughed, slowly, nodding again. “I
found the best pimp of all, baby—my senses. Just what
your lucky Larue and all the rest found. When I whore, I
whore for my habit; it don't need no Cadillac or pretty
clothes.”
The young whore stood, slamming her hand against the
table. “You can't talk with your stinkin mouth! I'm just a
whore for right now, just for a minute, and if there's any-
body I can trust it's Larue. Now, who have you got?
What have you got, you lousy bitch? You know what they
say-once a junkie, always a junkie.”
“Yeah, honey, you're right,” the nodding whore said,
blinking up. "But here's somethin you didn't know: once
you're a whore, that's all you'll ever be.”
The young whore stood speechless, then turned quickly
and went out. Ned heard her hard heels clicking sharply
on the ancient steps.
The nodding whore laughed, and began to nod again.
It was a while before the large woman returned, but she
brought a package the size of a brick with her and handed
it to Ned.
“Be careful,” she warned. "It's hot around here."
"I will.” He placed the package in the bag he'd brought
along.
After he'd been let out, he looked up and down the
street both ways, but he saw no sign of the young whore
Then, as the mass of dead buildings closed in on him


Twelve
TT HADN'T TAKEN BURRIS LONG to make his mind up, after
I talking with Cullen. There didn't seem to be any other
way out of it, not with Coral acting the way she was.
He closed the shop tonight without stealing a bit of meat
and walked down the main spread of street in the direction
of Ernie's Bar. He knew she wouldn't be there, not this
early. And, anyway, he wasn't coming. He wasn't coming
for a long goddamn time, Burris'd see to that.
As he walked down the street, he made his long fingers,
still blood-grimy from their work of the day, curl into big
hard fists, thinking of Ned Land and wishing. Wishing.
Wishing he could take a cleaver and not release it till
Ned no longer had a head, like the carcasses on hooks in
the freezer at the shop right now.
All because of her.
Prison had made him able to turn his eyes without the
use of his head; this he did while he walked, pausing in
thought only long enough to glance over at the warm lights
of the record shop. But he wasn't there, not where he
could see him through the windows. He felt his heart
flutter a little. . .
Well ...
It didn't make much difference which day Cullen did
126


130
CLARENCE L. COOPER, JR.
him, wouldn't we? See, I don't want to hurt your man
I could take him in my two hands and kill him. I just
want him to leave my woman alone, and I want to help
you. I gotta hunch: Guys at the poolroom tell me Ruck-
son's outta reefer. So he's gotta get some, and—”.
“You think Ned ...?”
Burris became animated. “Suppose he does it for Ruck-
son, or suppose Cullen finds him with some weed? You
know what I mean? Like I say, I just got a hunch, but
suppose we call a shot like that? He wouldn't get much
time, and it'd make up for somethin, wouldn't it?”
"I don't know ..."
“Look,” Burris said, and his face became a bit fierce.
“I think it's better if it did happen like that, because some-
thin's happenin to me that'd make me do somethin else
that wouldn't be so pretty. You don't want him to get
hurt?"
“No, please don't hurt him ”.
“Then let me take care of this ... I just want some
peace, peace with Coral, and I can't have it with him
here in Westphalia. You just let me take care of it."
"You gotta promise he won't be hurt."
“Just let me take care of the whole thing."
Doris stood and smoothed her dress tightly down over
her-small breasts. “Me and my son are leavin for Detroit
tonight.” She stopped and her face was confused. “Some-
times I feel like I'm crazy, like somebody big arranged
all this to happen to me. When I go home, I know I'll come
back and ... try to see him once before I go. I don't wanna
talk to him or anything-I just wanna see him.”
"I'll take care of it,” Burris said.
She drank her beer with a sad flourish. "I'll almost for-
get,” she said, and turned to make her way slowly through
the doing-riothing crowd, which soon absorbed her from
his view.
He sat and drank beers for the next thirty minutes, then
finally stood himself and went out. At the corner, looking
down to where he would have been unable to see a few


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131
yards further, he picked out Doris on the opposite side of
the street from Ned's shop. He strained to see the lights in
the front window of the place, then went on down the
street till he came to a public phone. He stopped and
dialed the number Cullen had given him.
“Yeah?” a police voice said.
“Let me speak to Mr. Cullen.”
“This is Cullen.”
“This is Burris, Mr. Cullen.”
“Burrisgood boy. What's up?"
“Will you meet me in an hour, the corner on the south
side, near the record shop? I got somethin to tell you."
Cullen's voice was hesitant now, no longer brewing a
police tone. “Is it about what we talked about?”
“That's right.”
“Look here, are you sure?”
“Just meet me in an hour and I'll explain everything'
to you.”
“Okay,” Cullen said, “I'll be there." .
Burris hung the phone up and started home, imagining
an odious scent about his body that he had never smelled
before or had not noticed: a fear smell that wavered in the
night air and accusingly hung about him...
He turned off the main street and walked quickly down
hill, the heavy business area composeci of a block-long salt
mine and two wheel bearing factories that had plunged
their tails into the face of a small mountain. He crossed
several railroad tracks, thin arms jutting out and into the
black bottom of the night sky, to the other side of town.
His house was one of a string of others that embraced
each other ineffectually, like a group of drunken old men,
wobbly in their stance, three stories high. On the other
side of the street pavement, wild bushes grew.
He stopped and looked up to the top floor of the place
they lived in and saw a light was in the window.
She was home.
He suddenly felt weak as he opened the front door with
the key on his ring and started up.


132
CLARENCE L. COOPER, JR.
When he came in the tiny apartment, she stood in front
of the dresser mirror, dressed in a tight sheath from last
week's pay, applying lipstick and powder, oblivious of
his entrance until he slammed the docr.
“Oh, goddamn,” she said, "do you have to scare the
hell out of me everytime you come in?”
"Where're you goin?” he said, coming over to stare at
her face in the mirror.
"Out.”
“You're not goin anywhere, Coral.”
“That's what you think.”
"No, that's what I mean," he said. "He's not gonna be
waitin for you."
“Who, Burris baby?”
“You know who I mean—the record shop man."
She threw her lipstick on the dresser. “Here we go.”
"He ain't ever gonna be waitin for you again."
“Are you crazy?” she said, turning to him. “You got
record shop man on the brain, and it's eatin right through."
"Take those goddamn clothes off, 'cause I mean what I
say, Coral-you ain't goin out tonight, or any other night.”
She stood, eyes simmering. “You get out of my way. I'm
so goddamn tired of you, I don't know what to do.”
She tried to come around him, but he pushed her back
to the chair in front of the mirror.
“You listen to me, Burris,” she said slowly. "I'm gonna
get the hell out of here tonight, one way or another. And
I ain't gonna let you push me around, you stupid bastard.”
"I'm not gonna let you meet him," he said in a loud
voice. “I told you he wasn't gonna be there-tonight or
any other night.”
“What are you talkin about?”
“Your record shop man-Ned Land.” And now he
grinned at her. "I told you that dope he was usin would
get him in trouble, and you don't know how lucky you
are you didn't get mixed up in it.”
She stared at him. "What did you do, Burris?"


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“Yeah,” he said, still grinning at her. “You'd like to
know, wouldn't you?”
“Burris ... what have you done?”
“I done what I needed to do a long time ago,” he half
hollered at her. “You think I'm gonna be a fool for the
rest of my life? You think you can step all over me any
damn way you like to, huh? Coral, goddamn you, you
just think I'm somethin good to play with, but I'll show you
and him, too. I made up my mind I'm not gonna be stepped
on anymore, and anybody who tries it is gonna get their
burly heads caved right in!”
“Burris—what did you do?”
He tapped a hard finger in his chest. “I turned your
lover man over got that woman had a baby by him to
help me send him off to the big house, to Jacktown, that's
what I did! I fixed it up so when he sees the sun every
day, it'll be twelve o'clock, just comin over the wall—I did
it! I gave him three meals and forty cents a day and a
movie on Sunday—I gave him plenty time to think over
what'll happen to him again if he messes with a man like
me! Now, you just take off that hot-pants dress and whore
face and set your tail in the right groove before I cut it
off. Ned Land is your fault, you evil bitch, and I'm not
sorry for one thing I did to him!”
Coral tried to burst past him to the door, but he grabbed
her by the arms and sunk his fingers in deeply. “I said
you're not goin anywhere, Coral, so you just make your
mind up to it."
"You goddamn fool, you," she snapped at him. “Ned
Land don't want me any more than I want you! And I
won't tell no lie-I tried to make him want me.” She
twisted in his hands. “Let me go! There's nothin you can
do to stop me from tellin him what you've done!”
“Coral, listen to me ..."
Her eyes blazed at him. “Get your hands off me, you
lousy pig—you jealous-hearted dog! Do you think Ned
Land is the only man in the world? There're others, just
like him—and I'll find them, whether it's in Westphalia or


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her quiet body for many minutes, looking ahead of him-
self and not yet aware of what he had done.
Then he said, “You'll make me hurt you, Coral, I swear
to God, you will."
Amazingly he did not comprehend—his consciousness
did not allow him to. He stepped over her body and went
to the doorway, remembering his appointment with Cullen.
"I told you you wasn't goin no where,” he said, but
refused to look at her body. “Now, damn it, you remem-
ber what I said."
He did not look.
And she lay curled atop; her face a-bulge, but below
her torso, her thighs and legs were sexually awry, revealing
panties and garter belt and fish-white inner thighs.
“Now, damn it, you remember,” he said, going out.
When he was outside in the night, going to meet the
policeman Cullen and hating Ned Land in a way that defied
his reason, he looked up at the lighted upper floor where
they lived and left these words alive on the empty street:
“And you better be home when I get back.”
He walked on, then said to himself as an afterthought:
"I never loved a woman so much.”
While the light in the upper room awaited his return.


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139
together. We like each other. You know how I like
Wanda.”
“Sure, yeah, I know," Mama said.
“Then why, old woman?” His hand came out toward
her, with no confirmation of strength. “Isn't Westphalia a
nice place? You know how I treat you and the girls, you
know that. Then why? Why do they have to come here
at all?”
“Don't worry,” Mama said.
“They're big operators,” Cullen said with quiet convic-
tion. "I've always been proud of Westphalia, old woman.
The way we work together. It was like the rest of the world
didn't matter, my old man used to say, him being a preach-
er. He used to say Westphalia was like a terminal with so
many people coming and going, they didn't have time to
do any harm.”
“Dope,” Mama said, as theme of what she intended to
say. “I've seen a lot of dope, boy, black dope you never
saw before. I know how you're scared—”
“I'm not afraid,” Cullen told her unafraidly.
“I was a cab’girl on a schooner," Mama said. “Bet ya
never heard of a somethin like that, did ya? I was cab’girl
for the Englush upper lords, on the way home from India
or Singapore. Ah, boy,” Mama sighed, “ahhh, boy. Such
times I had you'd never think would happen—all them
young white fingers a fingerin me 'cause I was black and
unusual. And dope!” She winked her white eye at him.
“Cocaine was their bowls of soup, and as many a hard
peter you never saw at one time alone in yer whole life.”
Cullen sighed too with the vision.
“You never been whipped by that salt wind,” Mama
said, with her creaking mind pulled to the past. “And once
in Manila, we saw the sharks chop at the pilins, that
hungry they was. And all the while the pink gods was
sniffin they cocaine and pushin me down to the bottom
of the boat. One said it was like doin it to a dog, but I
didn't mind, 'cause I knowed how they needed me. You


140 · CLARENCE L. COOPER, JR.
ain't never seen dope before, you, you boy, like I seen dope
in those days."
"It's that record shop fella I'm interested in."
"Ahh," Mama propped big white head on fist. "What
could I tell yer 'bout him? 'Cept he's a bad man."
“How do you know he's a bad man?” Cullen said.
“How do I know the way to make you spout yer last
drop?” Mama said. "How do I know the sea is a woman,
always givin birth? How do I know? I know, that's how I
know.”
Cullen looked impatiently around for Wanda.
Mama poured him another drink.
“Lissen," Mama said, and evil music began to come out
of the stereo, balling, brassy, bold.
She could see Cullen listening and not hearing anything.
She made her eyes into tiny slits. “You ever seen a spur
tongue cut right off? That's what I got, from the days I
was a girl. When you lose that bit, and you have to rape
yerself for satisfiedness, that's when you know for sure.”
Mama raised one huge fist over her head above him, and
for a moment it looked as though it would fall and crush
out his brains. "I know a war's comin, that's what I know,
that's what my black vision tells me I know the evil that
makes man live. I know. Don't ask me how I know. Ask
me who is God, and I tell yer Bala. This is because I know."
Cullen's eyes looked at her hard now, frozen.
"You ask me 'bout an evil man, and I tell ya.” She
looked about her, and for a moment listened to the waning
music from the thing in the corner, then she lowered her
voice. “He wants to take her way from here."
“Who?” Cullen said.
“The little black man,” Mama told him, “Ned Land.
He wants to take Wanda.” She watched him but couldn't
see the little lights in his eyes. "He's gone take her way
from me,” she said. “From you."
She tried to see his face change with her words, but
could not. In the red light it had a whitelike hue. His flesh
ck man; She wate's go


142
CLARENCE L. COOPER, JR.
Mama waited until the record clicked again, till she
found out what was coming, and at the same time she took
a kind of joy from the pain she could feel in Cullen.
“In the two years since you and the girls, Wanda, came
here,” he said, "there ain't been no trouble, old woman.”
"Trouble,” Mama said on a deep sea of cellos. "Trouble
is somethin bein taken away from you, boy, that's what
trouble is.”
"I've had it on good authority,” Cullen said, "that that
guy messes around with dope. This guy who told me
wouldn't lie. He said he found out from a woman who's
been coming to see the record shop guy."
"Trouble,” Mama mumbled.
Cullen was open because of the whiskey. "Listen. Can I
tell you something? I mean just us two here. Nobody but
us, and maybe I'll tell you this.”
“Sure, yeah, boy,” Mama said. "What you tells me dies
with me.”
Cullen flattened his hands on the bartop, the fingers
whiskey-wiggling yet still possessing sobriety, and Mama
felt his eyes looking helplessly at her: she knew how a little
man could seem enormous and huge.
“My daddy was a preacher,” Cullen said, while his lips
were weak for a moment. “You never had a daddy that
was a preacher, so you don't know, old woman.”
"I've been locked up before," Mama told him.
"But this daddy of mine," Cullen went on, blending with
the sorrowful music, the deep, big-daddy cellos, “was a
funny man among men. And he wanted everyone else to
be just like him.” Mama saw how the carbon couldn't be.
"Yeah, I got this job,” Cullen told her, “but I didn't want
it. Listen, old woman!” he flared, "you'd better not tell
this!”
"I won't,” Mama assured him, listening to the music,
raising her eyes to the highlights, "I won't.”
Cullen held out his glass. “Pour me a drink.”
“That's four bucks you owe me,” Mama told him, pour-
ing.


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145
"I want to talk with you," he told her.
He followed Wanda out of the room. Mama felt her heart
expanding within her. She put one hand on the bartop,
then another, then she shoved herself forward with a fat
surge of strength. While up above, the red light looked
down on her struggles. She reared against the bar, tilting
it with her weight; her feet felt caught and swollen against
the bottom part.
Bala good.
Her body shifted in turbulent coils as she forced her feet
to support her; it writhed in blackness and fat and sweat;
there was a dying stink from the lower part of it. Her body
moved slowly, inexorably, sometimes nearly falling to the
center of the earth, to the doorway, then the door, then the
hall, then down where the green light was burning under
the door. Except for the swaying of the house, Mama was
quiet, a great elephant striding soundless, a mammoth con-
centration. .
Beyond the door, she found another door and opened
it with a key from the ring pinned onto the breast of the
tent that was her dress. Mama came through, her heart
panting. This was the den of her thoughts, and the out-
wardly apparent was a shield on one wall from the krall of
a Tagai warrior; the boo-boo god, in a squatting manner
on the smaller dais: round, chubby, both woman and man,
tit, chest, and the crest on forehead that identified the
mother of fallatio, the drought her pleasure left.
On the platform which was wide as Mama, Bala grinned
down at the gods of excess and orgasm, a red, heavy moun-
tain, like Mama, sexless and impotent, but practiced
wielder of evil's sure, sharp sword.
Mama lumbered over to the wall and an eyeplace under
the wall's tassels. Sometimes she had a man make movies
from here. She heard the music outside switch to wild bop,
and at the same time her fading eyes saw Cullen in the
green room, kissing Wanda all over her body, and going
wild: Wanda on the bed, almost with him but telling him


146
CLARENCE L. COOPER, JR.
things he didn't want to hear, her thighs exposed where
Cullen was kissing them.
Good Bala.
Mama backed away on trembling legs. She could hear
their voices coming. She listened to make out the words.
She wasn't afraid, Mama wasn't, not about Cullen.
She backed away and started out of the room.
Bala good, make them die.
With great difficulty and intensity, Mama genuflected
beneath the statue of Bala. When she tried to rise, she found
she could not. She let her body collapse to one side until
she could get down one arm and push back hard with the
other. It took her five minutes to get up, and all the while
she heard their voices. When she got to the door, she
heard Cullen pleading and knew she had to hurry.
Her legs were happy going back. She found the bar and
stool and sat back to listen to Dizzy Gillespie's "Swing
Low, Sweet Chariot.”
Cullen passed so fast, she didn't see him when he left.
Then a little while later, Lorraine let Ned in. Mama began
to pray again..
"Hi, boy,” she said, as Ned came in.
"Hi, Mama. Where's Wanda?”
"Wanda's not here," Mama said.
Ned came over to the bar. "Where's she at?"
"I don't know. She went away with another trick.
Lorraine'll tell ya.” Lorraine stood in the doorway. “Tell
'im, Lorraine."
"She went away with another guy,” Lorraine grinned at
him.
Ned's face became hard. “When did she leave?"
"A few hours ago," Mama said.
"She just called me at the shop a half hour ago," Ned
said. He watched her closely; Mama prayed harder.
“Where's Wanda at, Mama? I don't believe what you're
trying to tell me."
“My girls leave sudden,” Mama said. "Terry left a
week ago, and you didn't know."


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147
with her miwanda said it: she tried to
"I know about Wanda," Ned said, his voice trembling.
"And I know Wanda's in this house. Please, Mama, I
don't wanna get upset with you or nobody else around
here, but I'm sure gonna raise a lot of hell if you don't
come up with her mighty quick.”
“I'm right here,” Wanda said from the doorway.
Mama's eyes flickered and fired; she tried to command
Wanda to silence, but she began to know that she was no
longer strong enough, and the fear that came on her
then was frightening with the kind of force of energy that
plotted an electric storm, or triggered a cataclysm.
“You get outta here, Ned man!” Mama said. “You
gone die, you stay around! You gone kill Wanda!” She
tried to rise and couldn't. “Go away before I make you
die!”
The decision was keen on Wanda's face, but she had
not packed, and Mama noticed this. Yet the light in her
face denied she needed bags; it was a freedom that made
Mama push against her fear.
“Go way, Ned Land, go way!”
Now Mama made her feet and swelled behind the bar,
while Ned stood glaring back and full of strength.
"I'm takin Wanda away from here,” he said. “You can't
stop me. I think I could kill somebody who tried to stop
me.”
"You suck at a whore, you man?” Mama bellowed.
“You want hyena shit? Go, fool, go, go!"
Wanda came and stood close to Ned, for it was best
their strength was two against the many strengths of Mama.
When Mama saw the way they were, she made the bar
crash over to the floor. The red light flared with a misdi-
rected flow of current; the music had a destructive sound.
Mama's flesh was jammed against Mama's flesh as she
moved toward them.
A slatter of Max Roach's drums was all that seemed to
be.
“GO WAY!” Mama hahhwrroared, to the introduction


148
CLARENCE L. COOPER, JR.
7
)
of an African saxophone, with drums and reed fifes, but
nobody heard it.
On the outer fringes, with scavenger's eyes, Lorraine
made herself a part of the room with maddened wishing.
Ned Land tensed to fight the giant coming at him. A
trumpet scattered and skittered with a getting-away step.
Mama bared her strong, blunt-edged eating teeth, coming
forward to demolish them and turn them into dung. She
would not let it happen, and she knew by the way her flesh
moved that it would not happen. Beneath her, Wanda and
Ned were as nothing. In her was a thousand black years,
in her was the knowledge of a thousand black years, and
it made them nothings, little ants, under her ancient feet.
But her daughter of sin, set free with the wish to be
free, stood forward, shielded Ned ineffectually but shield-
ing him still, stood forward to receive the rock of ages.
And she faced it with a cry of traitorous blood and the
genius of fettered flesh.
"You forgot to lock the door,” she said through teeth
bared like her mother's. “I've killed your god! Bala is
dead!”
Mama stopped altogether. Her heart began to fail. She
rumbled past them to the door. Wavering, slamming
against the walls, she went down to the room in which she
had watched Cullen and Wanda.
On the floor there, Bala was a coated insides of green
moss growing for ten thousand years, with two little snakes
and those that were theirs, that existed on that growth. The
phallic cross was there on the inside, and something that
was once its truthful pattern.
The music drummed away at Mama.
Mama stopped living.
She slammed over in the broken mess, making the whole
house roll and vibrate, where her black mouth came close
to the mouth of the shattered Bala, and her tongue came
out, white with foam, in another sort of dying supplication.
When Ned and Wanda looked down, shocked, on her


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149
from the doorway, Mama Harper was dead. And the
record ended outside.
But still she laughed out at them from the shadows of
the room.


152
CLARENCE L. COOPER, JR.
Monday appeared, green and good like reefer, like the
three bills in Ned Land's pocket. He pulled Wanda with
him along the lip of the inner circle, looking for an exit.
“Now," said the man with the dog, a long smile under
his wide black mustache. He bent and unleashed the collar,
then hooked his fingers under the collar, and held back the
snarling beast. It was a sick and angry animal, with teeth
that showed all the time, and a fur that was tattered and
red and torn, from fighting other animals like itself. Under-
neath were hard muscles packed into a short frame, and
the anxious beating of a heart that loved to kill.
The monkey was deep red in the pavilion lights, like
Brother Red had been—(and yet the dog was like Brother
Red, too)—its tail was long and whipping like a cat's.
Although the dog snarled aggressively, straining against
the owner's fingers, the monkey seemed calm and calculat-
ing, like a little banker, twiddling his two long thumbs that
way.
The dog raised itself on haunches, trying to get at the
monkey. The monkey squeaked and sat there laughing.
Littler than the smallest man, it turned beard and eyes up
lovingly at the man with the box, demanding a song, it
seemed to Ned, so that he could dance and laugh at the
antics of the other beast.
"We fight,” said the monkey's leader.
The crowding people hurrawed, and the man with the
dog backed away, to give the thing a running start. The
man with the box unhooked the box from himself, and bent
to the leash of the monkey. But befoze he did, he took a
pencil, stubby and thin, from his pocket, then took a
pocket knife from his pocket and shriveled down the lead
end to a sharp point. Then he bent down to the monkey's
level and said, “Pietro?”, like that, questioning, like asking
an older brother to solve a calculus problem. And at the
same time, he held out the sharpened pencil for the hairy
fingers to grasp. The monkey looked, then grasped fa-
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153
Ned felt Wanda's hand hard on his arm.
When the monkey's man began to wind his box, the
hairy half-man rose on two legs and pivoted around, to the
tones of “Lord He Wuz Doin Her Wrong"—then sprung
into the air while his master wound on, toward the startled
dog which had been released by the other man.
Ned looked on in horror, still not able to comprehend
the portentous form of the dear Mama Harper.
The monkey was in midair. His hand held the sharpened
pencil over his head. He held it like a dagger as he flew.
And when he landed, the way Ned knew he would, with
himself facing the butt part of the dog, astride the dog,
with his tail lashing securely around the dog's neck, he
used the harmless pencil with the plunging certainty of
death.
The dog yiped with the first downward stroke, which
had pierced its anus. It began to go around in a circle,
trying to throw the unthrowable monkey from its back.
Its cries were screams of unmortal terror, and Ned felt
himself cringe inside with the sound of them.
The dog's scream caught a sustained note. It began to
run around in mad circles. But the monkey was chopping
away, and finally had chopped down to the root of the
animal with the bloody pencil. He chopped, and chopped,
and chopped.
The dog's screams ended; it fell to its side with snap-
ping sounds, feet kicking, trying to kick the pain out. It
frothed at the mouth and tried to catch the moving-away
monkey; its eyes became glazed, like a drunk's. Its owner
watched it die as the monkey still chopped away, and it
seemed as though the monkey chatter was the chatter of
blood as he made it fly all about him.
Some of it got on Ned and Wanda.
The crowd opened up to let them through, but the last
they saw was the monkey standing victorious over the dog,
bloodily unmarked, and looking down in the dead dog's
face as though he were saying, “It was all a game. Why


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wasn't him at all, 'cause I couldn't know whether he was
good or bad, not knowin him. I saw all this, Coral ..."
She was silent and listened while he spoke, in a way
that he had wished to God for so many times.
“Like you said, Coral honey, it was me, the way I was
thinkin—that's what made you, wasn't it?" .
He paused in speaking for a long time, but she still did
not answer, and he could find no hint of anger on her quiet
face.
“It's bein locked up, what does it to a man,” he said.
“I tried to explain it to you a lot of times, but I couldn't
get started or get the right words together. I guess we all
locked up, one way or another. Even the record shop man's
locked up now, so I guess he'd understand, too, what I'm
tryin to explain to you.”
A tear fell into her face, but she still did not move, and
he began to realize she was dead.
He looked around and saw them waiting.
“All right, Burris," Mullins said quietly.
His conception was so strangely unsettled that he stood
almost eagerly.
"All right, Burris,” Mullins said again, as though it were
understanding that caused him to agree that everything was
truly all right.
They led him out in the hall, where the neighbor from
below who had called them stood staring opened-mouthed
into his wet face, an unbelieving hand clutching at the
throat of her old housecoat.
"We'll need to see you later today,” Mullins told her,
but she did not seem to hear as they went down the stairs.
Outside, the enormity of her death suddenly struck him
and he could not stop crying.
And the new morning shone as though it were the
Creator's most remarkable achievement.
A dew had come to the outside air. The new morning
felt clean and fresh to her, but the dew was really tears in
her eyes.


158 CLARENCE L. COOPER, JR.
Across the street she saw a tall yellow man looking over,
his head bent down, watching the police car taking her man
away, looking like Cullen might have looked if he were a
tall yellow man looking over, his head bent down.
It was as though the music of Ned Land kept going
around inside her head. She walked with a free step in the
outside air.
• The sweet, slow music of a dead Brown trumpet came to
her as she approached the shop, loud from the loudspeaker.
Across the street, in front of the house with the red candle,
a hearse pulled off.
She saw the man called Ruckson waiting within the shop.
And with a gash of gesture, with a hand upon her heart
to feel that it was still beating, with a new tear like the new
morning, a course of weird new current running in her
blood, she put her hand on the door and opened it to the
inside: in fact, she laughed as she came through, a tinkling
thing that Ned would have loved and she faced Ruckson
with an unafraidness she had never known before any man
in thirty-four years.
"He turned the shop over to me last night,” Ruckson
said, eyes tight. “I didn't want it, and I told him what he
was doin to me-how he was blowin my plans about San
Francisco.” He looked at her, without the sympathy she ex-
pected. “But he blowed a lot of plans, I guess his in-
cluded.”
She turned to go. .
“Don't you worry, kid,” he consoled her. “Ned'll only do
a year--two at most. He ain't got no record; they'll go easy
on him. But don't you worry: when he comes back, he'll
get everything that belongs to him."
"Sure,” Wanda said, still crying, going out, leaving the
door wide, “he'll get everything."
The music blared goodbye to her. But it was only good-
bye for a little while. She still had the ticket Ned Land had
given her, and his love. They both had tickets on a com-
mon trip, would one day meet on their way there.


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THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
GRADUATE LIBRARY
DATE DUE
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OCT 4 2 1992
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